The counterinsurgency battle in Washington

Celeste Ward:

When Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced Monday that he was dismissing Gen. David McKiernan as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan and replacing him with Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, he signaled his support for an intellectual movement that in a few short years has come to dominate military thinking in Washington. Both McChrystal and his new No. 2, Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, Gates emphasized, have a "unique skill set in counterinsurgency."

Counterinsurgency is king. Once the province of graduate students and historians of the conflicts in Vietnam and Algeria, this resurgent doctrine of how to wage a type of unconventional war has become the lens through which the American defense establishment analyzes what happened in Iraq, what to do now in Afghanistan, and the very future of warfare.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command and the former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, is the inspiration and leading light of this movement. In 2006, he coauthored the Army field manual on how to conduct counterinsurgency operations, stressing the need to provide security for the local population and support the host government, among other imperatives. A vocal cohort of students and adherents of counterinsurgency -- now given the inevitable military acronym "COIN" -- has emerged to advance the cause. New think tanks and blogs propagate and debate counterinsurgency research, and tomes exploring insurgencies past, present and future are on every cognoscente's reading list. Even the State Department has embraced the concept, composing its own counterinsurgency manual for U.S. civilian agencies.

Counterinsurgency doctrine is on the verge of becoming an unquestioned orthodoxy, a far-reaching remedy for America's security challenges. But this would be a serious mistake. Not all future wars will involve insurgencies. Not even all internal conflicts in unstable states -- which can feature civil wars, resource battles or simple lawlessness -- include insurgencies. Yet COIN is the new coin of the realm, often considered the inevitable approach to fighting instability in foreign lands. Now the Pentagon is shifting its budget and seeking to "rebalance" U.S. military power in order to institutionalize counterinsurgency doctrine. Clearly some of these capabilities are needed, but like many useful concepts that gain currency in Washington, counterinsurgency risks being taken too far, distracting us from other threats, challenges and strategic debates.

It is unclear whether McKiernan was fired for lacking commitment to counterinsurgency, but COIN advocates have already reached that conclusion. "Many of the people with whom I have spoken do not think that McKiernan 'gets' the war in Afghanistan -- or counterinsurgency warfare in general," Andrew Exum wrote last week on ForeignPolicy.com, while others have condemned McKiernan as "conventional" and "uninspired."

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She goes on the challenge many of the assumptions about our success in Iraq. The article become somewhat disjointed at that point. I think a more coherent description of events is that with our added force and that of the Iraqi army and militias that rallied to our side, we were able to to a force to space ratio on the street sufficient to cut off the enemies ability to move to contact without detection. That additional force protecting the people also resulted in a bonanza of intelligence on enemy sanctuaries that made it easier to find and destroy them.

Insurgency is the strategy of choice for our enemies at this point because they know they cannot defeat us in major combat operation warfare. It is a recognition of our strength. We need to maintain that strength or enemies will be challenging in that type of combat too.