Bump Up For The Commentary – Counterinsurgency: The Graduate Level of War or Pure Hokum?
08.19.2013 at 07:34pm
3 August post on COIN continues to evoke stimulating commentary…
Well I read the article and to this forever a civilian it was 11 paragraphs of Big Army sour grapes. I expect to get lambasted for this but once in, go fast I guess.
That a member or members of the professional officer corps gives or give a good golly goldurn about some perceived insult because of a throwaway line about small war fighting being “postgraduate” vs. graduate or some such nonsense strikes me as juvenile silliness. This sounds like the high school football players talking about who is more important, the offensive line or the defensive line. This is war, life and death, young men looking to the professional officers for life and death and some of those officers have their panties in a bunch about being dissed by Victor Davis Hansen. Those guys are looking to the officers to get it right, the fighting part, big or small, and I suspect they don’t care a whit about whether the proper respect has been shown by somebody somewhere. And they don’t give a rat’s arsenal about whether popular culture lionizes some general or other at the expense of a more sophisticated appreciation of history.
Gian dismisses the notion that small war requires a special skill set, yet he is an instructor at West Point, an institution that exists to teach a special skill and ranks the students on how well they master it. Military history is rife with examples of guys with special skill sets taking over an outfit or an effort and transforming things. To say that small war doesn’t show the same pattern is to cherry pick history for the sake of Big Army sensibilities. There is a world of difference between having a McFarland or a McMaster running the show vs. a Tunnell or a Steele.
Human terrain teams are given some criticism, probably rightly. But why were the HTTs created? They were created to help the guys on the ground know what the heck was going on in their areas. Knowing what is going on in the local area is critical in fighting a small war. Why did they need help in knowing what was going on? Because they weren’t in one place long enough to learn before they were moved. That was, I’ve read, mainly the result of Big Army personnel policies that could not be changed to accommodate the realities of the war actually being fought. What started as a rap at a ham handed attempted to fight a small war better, is actually an indictment of Big Army that absolutely refused to change certain things for the sake of winning a war.
Whether or not “COIN” is hokum…is…it don’t mean nothin’, because “COIN” don’t mean nothin’ beyond being used as a pejorative stand in for whatever some writers on whatever disapprove of. So Ms. Fontan said “COIN” was bad; that’s nice. What the heck did she mean?
There is hokum in the area though. That hokum is cravenness of the American general officer corps, the reification of Big Army ethos, when it comes to being truthful about who the enemy is in Afghanistan. There hasn’t been one that I’ve heard of who risked his career to say “Sir, I can’t send my men out if we don’t do something about the Pak Army/ISI. I won’t send them if I can’t do everything I can to protect them and sir, if it costs me my career then so be it.” That is hokum.
You may find this riposte of interest by Terry Tucker: http://www.e-ir.info/2013/08/20/an-open-rebuttal-to-gian-gentiles-essay-on-counterinsurgency/
I’m fairly new to the realm of military academics and I think this affords me somewhat of a fresh mindset when it comes this discussion. Although I can understand the frustration on both sides, I see two primary opinions that are invalid, as they are not argued on the same plane. First off, I’ve not read his latest book and I’m not likely to, at least in the near term, but I have listened to COL Gentile speak several times and I have followed his posts here and in other forums. I have also worked first hand on the opposite end, mentoring and instructing brigade 2 and 3 shops at COIN seminars.
I don’t think COL Gentile is necessarily trying to argue whether or not COIN is currently a core mission, capability, or competency. I think he is simply arguing that it shouldn’t be and… for the most part I tend to agree. I see COIN as a decade-long distraction from what big Army should be doing, conventional. We have many specialized units for FID, humanitarian assistance, etc. in each branch of service. The costs are too high to invest so much of our force into COIN. Let’s be honest, it’s simply not financially possible to maintain large-scale COIN like we have in Afghanistan. Is anyone arguing that our COIN strategy in Afghanistan is/will be a (long-term) success? Iraq? If not then why is COIN still such a huge topic of debate? I’m quite certain that we’ll have all new doctrine by the time we can afford to nation-build again.