x-factor
03-15-2008, 08:13
The title refers to this article (supposedly the first in a series) in The Washington Independent that talks about the debates (and political machinations) in the American military over the proper place and practice of counterinsurgency warfare.
The Colonels and 'The Matrix'
First in a Series: The Rise of the Counterinsurgents
By Spencer Ackerman 03/06/2008
In the spring of 2007, as the first wave of new combat brigades arrived in Baghdad to execute President George W. Bush’s troop surge, an Army lieutenant colonel named Paul Yingling booted up his computer at Ft. Hood, Tex. He received an email accusing him of moral cowardice. It was from Yingling’s friend, a fellow Iraq veteran and Army lieutenant colonel named Gian Gentile.
Gentile was concerned about a highly influential article that Yingling had written for the magazine Armed Forces Journal titled "A Failure In Generalship." The piece was incendiary. Yingling, barely 40 and an Iraq veteran twice over, had issued a j’accuse to the entire general officer corps for failing, over the previous 15 years, to anticipate low-intensity conflicts with insurgents and prepare U.S. troops accordingly. He further contended that the generals failed to deliver their best military advice to the Bush administration about the true costs of the war in Iraq, preferring not to challenge the White House’s optimistic fantasies. "Failing to visualize future battlefields represents a lapse in professional competence," Yingling had written, "but seeing those fields clearly and saying nothing is an even more serious lapse in professional character." The people he criticized have the power to end his career.
But to Gentile, Yingling was the lapsed officer. In his email, and then in a volley of op-eds and blog posts over the next year, Gentile derided Yingling for failing to call any general out by name. Worse yet, Gentile now contends that blaming the generals represents a myopia on the part of Yingling’s fellow counterinsurgency enthusiasts—until recently, he counted himself one—to accept the U.S. failure in Iraq. "By not naming names," Gentile, now a history professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, said in a phone interview, "he has left it open for the generals themselves to interpret who’s in the Yingling-screw-up crowd. The way that comes out, until the early months of the surge, he doesn’t want to say who but he really means [former Iraq commander and now Army Chief of Staff Gen. George] Casey, only a few units got it right and finally, maybe, we’re on the right track with Gen. Petraeus and the surge." Both Yingling and Gentile claim to have received heaps of supportive email from soldiers.
In this argument between two respected senior officers, the next major debate over U.S. defense policy can be gleaned. Yingling speaks for an ascending cadre of young defense intellectuals, most of whom are Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, who assert that the U.S. military must embrace principles of counterinsurgency if it is to triumph in the multifaceted fight against global terrorism. Gentile, formerly one of those theorist-practitioners, believes the military has already moved too far in the direction of counterinsurgency, which he contends allows analysts to ignore the limits of U.S. military power. Both arguments represent an attempt to answer a searing question: What are the lessons of Iraq?
Ultimately, the answer to that question will probably be endlessly debated. But the counterinsurgency community—they call it "COIN"—has perhaps the most organized answer. Counterinsurgency is a much-disputed concept, but it refers to methods of warfare used to divide a civilian population’s political and sentimental allegiance away from a guerrilla force. From the start of the Iraq war, a cadre of warrior-thinkers in the military has questioned the use of tactics that focus more on killing enemies than giving the Iraqi population reasons not to support terrorists, insurgents and militias. "We don’t just talk about the enemy, we talk about the environment," explained Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, until two weeks ago the corps commander in Iraq, in a lecture Wednesday at the Heritage Foundation. Not all of them assert that the early use of a counterinsurgency strategy could have won the war. But most contend, after the decline in violence in Iraq during the last half of 2007, that a counterinsurgency strategy would have allowed the war to have been less deadly than it is.
This small but dedicated group includes, most prominently, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. military forces in Iraq and Marine Gen. James "Mad Dog" Mattis, commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command. Other luminaries are Petraeus COIN braintrusters like David Kilcullen, a gregarious former Australian Army officer and State Department adviser; Army Col. Peter Mansoor, who will soon teach military history at the Ohio State University; and Army Lt. Col. John Nagl, who helped craft Petraeus and Mattis’ much-praised Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, a seminal text for the COIN community known as FM 3-24.
Less visible but highly influential members—many are lieutenants, captains and enlisted soldiers and Marines who came of age in Iraq and Afghanistan—include Janine Davidson, who works in the Pentagon’s directorate of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict; cultural anthropologist Montgomery McFate; Harvard human-rights expert Sarah Sewall (an adviser to Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign); and Marine Corps University Professor Erin M. Simpson. The Democratic-aligned Center for a New American Security think tank plays host to many emerging counterinsurgency figures, like Colin Kahl, Nate Fick, Roger Carstens, Shawn Brimley, and, starting in the fall, Nagl. During moments of downtime, the community obsessively reads and comments on the Small Wars Journal and Abu Muqawama blogs.
Drawing on arcane military and academic histories of largely forgotten "small wars" in places like Malaya and the Philippines, the counterinsurgents place a premium on using the minimum amount of violence needed to target a shadowy enemy; on intimate knowledge of foreign cultures to cleave civilian populations from an insurgency; on distinguishing enemies that can be co-opted from "irreconcilables" that must be killed; on using proxy forces whenever possible; and on the central recognition that military force can never substitute for a political strategy that offers better, deliverable alternatives to a population than those presented by an adversary.
These are the lessons that the counterinsurgents believe need to be applied—first in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then institutionalized throughout the military. To them, institutionalization is key: it’s something that the military avoided in the generation between Vietnam and Iraq, so as not to entangle the U.S. in any more counterinsurgency campaigns—even as adversaries adjusted to America’s conventional military dominance. During the Clinton years, the Pentagon focused on buying "more high-tech jet fighters, artillery systems, and sensors, while there was very little [emphasis] on low-intensity warfare," Yingling said. "Even as we’re operating in Somalia, the Balkans, and elsewhere, where we’re trying to develop security forces and build governance capacity, we were disconnected from our experience in the 1990s."
There are some early signs of institutionalization. First, Petraeus has become a national hero, thanks in large measure to the administration’s use of him to bolster dwindling support for the war. Second, before he left for Iraq, Petraeus commanded the Combined Arms Center at Ft. Leavenworth, a bastion of the Army’s institutional knowledge, where he established perhaps the first counterinsurgency course for young officers. Third, in the fall, the Army briefly recalled Petraeus to the U.S. to preside over which colonels to promote to brigadier general.
Fourth, the Army recently raised stability operations to equal importance with offensive and defensive operations in its official Operations manual, FM 3-0—adding a new category of warfare for the first time in the Army’s 232-year history. Finally, Petraeus’ corps commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, will become the Army’s vice chief of staff, though Odierno’s commitment to counterinsurgency is a matter of debate within the community.
Yet the counterinsurgents, owing to their outsider status for a generation, consider themselves a besieged minority inside the military, with "Big Army," elements in the Marine Corps, and the non-ground services out to marginalize this method of warfare it finds undesirable. The Marine Commandant, Gen. James Conway, has seemed to slight counterinsurgency in his public statements as a "lesser-included" mission of the Marine Corps. Counterinsurgents noted glumly that Nagl never received a promotion to full colonel. Even with Petraeus at the helm of the promotions board, some wonder whether a colonel named H.R. McMaster, who successfully implemented a counterinsurgency strategy in the Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005 at the command of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, will ever receive his first star.
continued in the next post...
The Colonels and 'The Matrix'
First in a Series: The Rise of the Counterinsurgents
By Spencer Ackerman 03/06/2008
In the spring of 2007, as the first wave of new combat brigades arrived in Baghdad to execute President George W. Bush’s troop surge, an Army lieutenant colonel named Paul Yingling booted up his computer at Ft. Hood, Tex. He received an email accusing him of moral cowardice. It was from Yingling’s friend, a fellow Iraq veteran and Army lieutenant colonel named Gian Gentile.
Gentile was concerned about a highly influential article that Yingling had written for the magazine Armed Forces Journal titled "A Failure In Generalship." The piece was incendiary. Yingling, barely 40 and an Iraq veteran twice over, had issued a j’accuse to the entire general officer corps for failing, over the previous 15 years, to anticipate low-intensity conflicts with insurgents and prepare U.S. troops accordingly. He further contended that the generals failed to deliver their best military advice to the Bush administration about the true costs of the war in Iraq, preferring not to challenge the White House’s optimistic fantasies. "Failing to visualize future battlefields represents a lapse in professional competence," Yingling had written, "but seeing those fields clearly and saying nothing is an even more serious lapse in professional character." The people he criticized have the power to end his career.
But to Gentile, Yingling was the lapsed officer. In his email, and then in a volley of op-eds and blog posts over the next year, Gentile derided Yingling for failing to call any general out by name. Worse yet, Gentile now contends that blaming the generals represents a myopia on the part of Yingling’s fellow counterinsurgency enthusiasts—until recently, he counted himself one—to accept the U.S. failure in Iraq. "By not naming names," Gentile, now a history professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, said in a phone interview, "he has left it open for the generals themselves to interpret who’s in the Yingling-screw-up crowd. The way that comes out, until the early months of the surge, he doesn’t want to say who but he really means [former Iraq commander and now Army Chief of Staff Gen. George] Casey, only a few units got it right and finally, maybe, we’re on the right track with Gen. Petraeus and the surge." Both Yingling and Gentile claim to have received heaps of supportive email from soldiers.
In this argument between two respected senior officers, the next major debate over U.S. defense policy can be gleaned. Yingling speaks for an ascending cadre of young defense intellectuals, most of whom are Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, who assert that the U.S. military must embrace principles of counterinsurgency if it is to triumph in the multifaceted fight against global terrorism. Gentile, formerly one of those theorist-practitioners, believes the military has already moved too far in the direction of counterinsurgency, which he contends allows analysts to ignore the limits of U.S. military power. Both arguments represent an attempt to answer a searing question: What are the lessons of Iraq?
Ultimately, the answer to that question will probably be endlessly debated. But the counterinsurgency community—they call it "COIN"—has perhaps the most organized answer. Counterinsurgency is a much-disputed concept, but it refers to methods of warfare used to divide a civilian population’s political and sentimental allegiance away from a guerrilla force. From the start of the Iraq war, a cadre of warrior-thinkers in the military has questioned the use of tactics that focus more on killing enemies than giving the Iraqi population reasons not to support terrorists, insurgents and militias. "We don’t just talk about the enemy, we talk about the environment," explained Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, until two weeks ago the corps commander in Iraq, in a lecture Wednesday at the Heritage Foundation. Not all of them assert that the early use of a counterinsurgency strategy could have won the war. But most contend, after the decline in violence in Iraq during the last half of 2007, that a counterinsurgency strategy would have allowed the war to have been less deadly than it is.
This small but dedicated group includes, most prominently, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. military forces in Iraq and Marine Gen. James "Mad Dog" Mattis, commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command. Other luminaries are Petraeus COIN braintrusters like David Kilcullen, a gregarious former Australian Army officer and State Department adviser; Army Col. Peter Mansoor, who will soon teach military history at the Ohio State University; and Army Lt. Col. John Nagl, who helped craft Petraeus and Mattis’ much-praised Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, a seminal text for the COIN community known as FM 3-24.
Less visible but highly influential members—many are lieutenants, captains and enlisted soldiers and Marines who came of age in Iraq and Afghanistan—include Janine Davidson, who works in the Pentagon’s directorate of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict; cultural anthropologist Montgomery McFate; Harvard human-rights expert Sarah Sewall (an adviser to Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign); and Marine Corps University Professor Erin M. Simpson. The Democratic-aligned Center for a New American Security think tank plays host to many emerging counterinsurgency figures, like Colin Kahl, Nate Fick, Roger Carstens, Shawn Brimley, and, starting in the fall, Nagl. During moments of downtime, the community obsessively reads and comments on the Small Wars Journal and Abu Muqawama blogs.
Drawing on arcane military and academic histories of largely forgotten "small wars" in places like Malaya and the Philippines, the counterinsurgents place a premium on using the minimum amount of violence needed to target a shadowy enemy; on intimate knowledge of foreign cultures to cleave civilian populations from an insurgency; on distinguishing enemies that can be co-opted from "irreconcilables" that must be killed; on using proxy forces whenever possible; and on the central recognition that military force can never substitute for a political strategy that offers better, deliverable alternatives to a population than those presented by an adversary.
These are the lessons that the counterinsurgents believe need to be applied—first in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then institutionalized throughout the military. To them, institutionalization is key: it’s something that the military avoided in the generation between Vietnam and Iraq, so as not to entangle the U.S. in any more counterinsurgency campaigns—even as adversaries adjusted to America’s conventional military dominance. During the Clinton years, the Pentagon focused on buying "more high-tech jet fighters, artillery systems, and sensors, while there was very little [emphasis] on low-intensity warfare," Yingling said. "Even as we’re operating in Somalia, the Balkans, and elsewhere, where we’re trying to develop security forces and build governance capacity, we were disconnected from our experience in the 1990s."
There are some early signs of institutionalization. First, Petraeus has become a national hero, thanks in large measure to the administration’s use of him to bolster dwindling support for the war. Second, before he left for Iraq, Petraeus commanded the Combined Arms Center at Ft. Leavenworth, a bastion of the Army’s institutional knowledge, where he established perhaps the first counterinsurgency course for young officers. Third, in the fall, the Army briefly recalled Petraeus to the U.S. to preside over which colonels to promote to brigadier general.
Fourth, the Army recently raised stability operations to equal importance with offensive and defensive operations in its official Operations manual, FM 3-0—adding a new category of warfare for the first time in the Army’s 232-year history. Finally, Petraeus’ corps commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, will become the Army’s vice chief of staff, though Odierno’s commitment to counterinsurgency is a matter of debate within the community.
Yet the counterinsurgents, owing to their outsider status for a generation, consider themselves a besieged minority inside the military, with "Big Army," elements in the Marine Corps, and the non-ground services out to marginalize this method of warfare it finds undesirable. The Marine Commandant, Gen. James Conway, has seemed to slight counterinsurgency in his public statements as a "lesser-included" mission of the Marine Corps. Counterinsurgents noted glumly that Nagl never received a promotion to full colonel. Even with Petraeus at the helm of the promotions board, some wonder whether a colonel named H.R. McMaster, who successfully implemented a counterinsurgency strategy in the Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005 at the command of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, will ever receive his first star.
continued in the next post...