"The Rise of the Counterinsurgents"

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Meanwhile, the procurement priorities of the Army haven’t significantly changed since Iraq, nor have the ground services gotten a significantly bigger piece of the budgetary pie. "The Army has gotten a much bigger share than it has traditionally because of the costs of the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it plays the dominant role," said Steve Kosiak, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "In terms of the ‘base’ budget—i.e., the budget exclusive of war costs— its share has grown as well, but only very modestly. It still receives slightly less than the Navy and Air Force."

Gentile considers the counterinsurgents’ sense of beseigement to be ludicrous. To him, the military is undergoing a titanic shift in favor of counterinsurgency with little debate over the implications. "I worry about a hyper-emphasis on COIN and irregular warfare," he said in a phone interview, with "less mechanization, less protection and more infantry on the ground walking and talking with the people. It’s a potential recipe for disaster if our enemies fight the way Hezbollah did against the Israelis in the summer of ‘06."

He continued, "Petraeus sat on the promotion board. Do we really think H.R. won’t have a star on his shoulder? They’re the ones in control. I don’t see how they can think otherwise. They’re almost like the minority party that finally becomes the majority party and can’t get over the fact they’re the majority!"

Gentile even has a term for the counterinsurgents’ view of their place in the Army: he calls it The Matrix, after the mind-controlling Baudrillardian machine that alters the perception of reality in the eponymous Wachowski Brothers films.

There was a time when he would have swallowed the blue pill. Gentile served two tours in Iraq, first in Tikrit in 2003 under Odierno and then in western Baghdad in 2006, commanding an armored cavalry squadron. Despite what he calls a counterinsurgents’ "master narrative," whereby counterinsurgency arrives in Iraq first in Tal Afar with McMaster and then in Baghdad with Petraeus, Gentile said that units—including his own—applied COIN practices throughout the war. "Clearly, there are examples of units not getting it," he said. "But I believe that at the tactical level—infantry scouts, platoons, companies and battalions—performed [counterinsurgency operations] by the book even before FM 3-24." Yet, Gentile observed, conditions in Iraq got worse, not better.

That realization turned Gentile from a COIN practitioner to a COIN skeptic. Essentially, he swallowed the red pill to escape the Matrix during the triumphalism surrounding the troop surge in 2007. Counterinsurgency, he now believes, has a role in a modern military, but an excessive focus on it serves as an alibi to avoid recognizing that the U.S. military is not omnipotent. "I think Andrew Bacevich, at the policy-strategy level, has basically nailed it," Gentile said, referring to the retired Army colonel who contends that Iraq is an irredeemable strategic mistake. "He points out the limits of what American military power can accomplish."

Yingling finds his friend’s argument to be, at the least, premature. To him, there are too many vestiges of an improperly-footed military encumbering counterinsurgency to conclude that it has been fully tested and found wanting. "Why are our acquisition priorities the same as before 9/11?" he said from Ft. Hood, where he commands the 1st Battalion, 21st Field Artillery. "My field artillery battalion, we’ve got a multi-launch rocket system to guard detainees. We built the wrong Army in the 1990s and now we’re breaking it apart to fight the war we’ve got." He continued, "The notion that America’s power as a nation is somehow at its limits today as we spend four percent of our GDP on defense and have an active-duty Army of half a million just doesn’t square with history."


Nor can he accept Gentile’s argument that "A Failure In Generalship" needed to name names. "The failures of our general officer corps, through Vietnam and Iraq, occur independently of a single individual," said Yingling, who learned counterinsurgency while soldiering for McMaster in Tal Afar. "To focus on individual culpability misses the point. There’s a structural problem with how the armed forces develop senior leaders. And until we address it, we’ll keep getting the same result."

Just as Gentile believes there’s a place for counterinsurgency in the military, neither does Yingling adopt a zero-sum approach to conventional warfare. "The high-intensity [side of things], I certainly don’t want to abandon it," he said. "There’s a good debate to be had about what that balance should be."

Striking that balance is the central question in U.S. military circles in 2008, and the counterinsurgency community is at the heart of it. Gentile has joined the battle in a very visible way. In newspaper pieces, in blog posts and in extended scholarly articles—including some that call out Yingling directly—he has warned of an uncritical drift toward counterinsurgency. In a widely read Small Wars Journal post on Tuesday, he accused the Army of sleep-walking into adopting FM 3-24. "It is necessary now to accept the truth that there was not wide-ranging debate within the Army and from that premise start one over our Counterinsurgency and Operational doctrine that is truly based on wide-ranging criticism in a ‘big tent,’" he wrote. "It is time to start thinking out loud." That earned him a rebuke from Charlie, one of the pseudonymous authors of the military blog Abu Muqawama: "Charlie is looking forward to reading his competing approach to counter-insurgency operations."

That’s "the Matrix, though," Gentile contends—"that’s why I’m hammered so much." To Gentile, the inability of the counterinsurgency community to see that it’s winning the debate represents a convenient distortion of reality comparable to the leitmotif of the hit film: "They think they’re me, but I’m them."

One thing Yingling and Gentile readily agree on is that the military will suffer from lack of intellectual reassessment. "We don’t agree on every point," Yingling said, "but we do agree on the need for a rigorous debate in the Army about what kind of threats we face and what the Army needs [to defeat them]. I would not want the Army to rigidly adopt COIN doctrine in the same way we rigidly adopted high-intensity mechanized state-on-state warfare."

Like most in the Army, Yingling cannot afford to treat that debate frivolously. Next month, he and his battalion will go back to Iraq, where they will be part of the first wave of post-surge forces. "I hope that we are able to build Iraqi capabilities to the point where the stability the surge produced becomes self-sustaining," he said on the phone. "If we accomplish that, if we contribute to it, during my third tour in Iraq, I will consider it pretty successful."

And there will be more lessons to learn—and debate—when he returns.

http://www.washingtonindependent.com...lonels-and-the