Learning from Our Wrong Turn
Learning from Our Wrong Turn – “Why American counterinsurgency has proved to be unworkable.” Bing West interview with Gian Gentile, National Review.
The commonly used aphorism by counterinsurgency experts is that COIN is the “graduate level of war,” thus implying that it requires some special kind of skill set to be carried out correctly and that it should be led by enlightened savior generals such as David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal. But the truth of the matter is that American counterinsurgency – armed nation building – at the tactical level of platoons, companies, battalions, and brigades is simply not that difficult. The difficulty of these wars, rather, rests at the levels of strategy and policy, and the American failure in Iraq and Afghanistan can best be explained from those angles. Unfortunately, the myth of the counterinsurgency narrative is that modern American counterinsurgency wars – Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan – could have been won if only the army had done counterinsurgency better under enlightened generals. Yet the truth about America’s failures in these wars has to do with weakness in other places.
