The COIN Myth - counterinsurgency field manual...281-page volume of balderdash

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The COIN Myth

Posted by Jeff Huber

The U.S. military’s fabled counterinsurgency field manual (FM 3-24) is an authoritative-sounding 281-page volume of balderdash. Even the legend of its origin is a fabrication. Gen. David Petraeus, former commander of forces in Iraq and now in charge of Central Command, supposedly "wrote the book," but the book was actually hammered together from plagiarized material in 2004 by Dr. Conrad Crane and others at the Army War College.

This was during the time frame that "King David" Petraeus was in charge of training Iraqi security forces, a tour during which he lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 rifles and pistols and other combat equipment that without question wound up in the hands of militants. The part of the manual Petraeus "wrote" was his signature on the manual’s endorsement letter when he was in command of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center in 2006.

There’s nothing new in the military about generals taking credit for the hard work of underlings, of course, especially when the general in question is a fast-rising self-promotion genius like "Teflon General" Petraeus. And plagiarism is so common in military publications that it’s the norm, not the exception. Like I used to say in my active-duty days, if you really think the brass want you to think out of the box, you’re out of your mind. Military doctrine is loaded with copy-and-paste palaver that goes back decades, sometimes more than a century, reflecting the expert perspective of experts who died so long ago that nobody can tell you who they were. That way, nobody swings in the wind for having an original idea that doesn’t work out.

That’s much of the reason we nearly always execute tactics and strategies that apply to wars other than the ones we’re actually fighting. Our present counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine is a perfect example. It is inadequate in many ways, but four aspects of it are particularly at odds with today’s conditions on the ground. ... http://www.atlargely.com/atlargely/2010/01/the-coin-myth.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Flariska%2Fatlargely+%28at-Largely%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

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1. The real problem, which never gets talked about, in these COIN situations

is that if you really do empower and support legitimate local political and social forces, the first thing they want to do is kick you out. And that leads to the other fundamental problem that never gets talked about: that we almost always try to insist on staying.