Over the Horizon: Dead or Alive, COIN is not the Culprit
Over the Horizon: Dead or Alive, COIN is not the Culprit
by Robert Farley
World Politics Review
Why does COIN seem insufficient? Military institutions rely on narratives in order to continue to operate. The Soviet Army sustained itself for 30 years, and the U.S. Army perhaps longer, on the narrative of defeating the Wehrmacht in World War II. The stories that make up these narratives don’t need to be accurate, but they do need to be compelling, and COIN wars just don’t make for good stories. They take too long; the politics are complicated; the enemies aren’t terrible enough; and the victories aren’t clear-cut enough. Even COIN advocates argue that counterinsurgency conflicts will be long, bloody, expensive and unsatisfying. That is in part why the U.S. Army believed, in 1973, that the counterinsurgency efforts practiced in the later years of the Vietnam War would not provide a useful foundation for rebuilding the force. Gentile, too, may well be right to think that COIN cannot provide a useful model for the future of today’s U.S. Army, even if he regularly overstates his case.
