The war against the couterinsurgency manual

Small Wars Journal:

The December ’07 issue of Armed Forces Journal contains two commentary pieces that are harbingers of a debate brewing “inside and outside the beltway” concerning Counterinsurgency (COIN) / Irregular Warfare (IW) operations “after Iraq.” While the two AFJ articles focus on Army and Marine Corps COIN doctrine approved last December and its execution in Iraq, the issues the authors raise will most certainly carryover into a larger debate that will shape our National Security Strategy and military capabilities for decades to come.

The first article, Dishonest Doctrine by Ralph Peters, accuses the Army and Marine Corps of selective use of history in writing FM 3-24 / MCWP 3-33.5 Counterinsurgency. Arguably the most damning of Peters’ claims is his accusation that the primary authors took an “academic approach” – formulating conclusions up-front in the writing process and conducting biased research in search of historical examples that supported those conclusions.

The troubling aspect of all this for the Army’s intellectual integrity comes from the neo-Stalinist approach to history a number of the manual’s authors internalized during their pursuit of doctorates on “the best” American campuses. Instead of seeking to analyze the requirements of counterinsurgency warfare rigorously before proceeding to draw impartial conclusions based on a broad array of historical evidence, they took the academic’s path of first setting up their thesis, then citing only examples that supported it.

The troubling aspect of Peters’ claim is his questioning the intellectual and personal integrity of the primary authors. As someone who has professional and personal relationships with many of those authors I can only write that off as an unfortunate by-product of Peters' in-your-face adversarial and controversy-driven writing style. That said, it does anger me that he took such an over-the-top and deceitful approach.

What Peters neglects to mention is the true primary authors were Army General David Petraeus and Marine Generals James Amos and James Mattis. He makes scant reference to Petraeus “signing off" on the doctrine, leaving an impression that FM 3-24 was just another in a long line of documents that briefly cross a general’s desk in need of the official rubber stamp. This is seriously misleading as all three generals took keen personal interest in the production of FM 3-24 - offering up time and resources to see the process through. Petraeus and Mattis in particular, as commanders who led ground units in a COIN environment in Iraq and as serious students of the art of war, placed high priority in filling a doctrinal gap and “getting it right”.

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Dave Dilegge wrote the piece for Small Wars Journal and he had some first hand knowledge of the process. It is worth reading in full. I recently got the manual and it is going to be on my, to read list. What I find troubling about the criticism is that it seems to ignore the real world results. I am a firm believer in results as a measure of success, and even Ralph Peters argues that we are now winning in Iraq.

I have always been a big proponent of a high force to space ratio for fighting an insurgency and the manual seems to recognize that and takes it to a new level with the help of anthropology and other studies to win the people to our side. It is more than ironic that Lt. Gen. Sanchez kept saying he did not need more troops, he just needed better intelligence, but when we added the troops and started protecting the people we got the intelligence we needed to destroy the enemy. It is amazing that more do not see the correlation of the two. I will have much more on this when I finish the book.

There is another point that needs to be made about the importance of the manual and defeating the enemy in Iraq. There are very few countries that are willing to challenge the US in conventional warfare, because we have demonstrated an ability to quickly destroy and adversary in that kind of war. It is critical that we demonstrate a capacity to destroy enemies using insurgency warfare, are we will be dealing with a lot more small wars. On a strategic level that is the most important reason for winning the war in Iraq.