Andrew Exum's got a post from about a week ago, and linked to some books recommended by Gian Gentile, who is a fairly outspoken critic of counterinsurgency (COIN), or perhaps the U.S.'s approach to it. For those who aren't tracking, ever since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, there has been an ongoing academic debate inside defense policy circles regarding the merits of COIN. When it became apparent that Iraq was not going to transition to a state of stable peace in anything resembling a timely fashion, the U.S. military found itself desperately treading water. Counterinsurgency was a dirty word, because no one wanted to admit that an insurgency existed in Iraq: too many comparisons to Vietnam, and too many painful propositions that our failure to conduct stability operations post-invasion may have been a major catalyst for the insurgency and almost-civil war.
Of course, David Petraeus and his hundred-pound-brain (along with other smart guys, like John Nagl) stepped out of the shadows and suddenly COIN lost its stigma and became the messiah of strategies. History will determine the ultimate effectiveness of America's COIN campaign in Iraq.
In any case, today there is a huge identity crisis in the U.S. military, in the Army and Marine Corps in particular (the service branches most invested in ground combat). While the Air Force and Navy find themselves affected by the prevalence of stability operations and irregular warfare in the modern operating environment (effects on budgets, equipment programs, etc.), the way they fight is not as profoundly impacted as it is for the grunts and mud-crawlers. Sure: the Air Force's primary mission of air superiority doesn't get exercised too often nowadays, but an A-10 conducting a close air support (CAS) mission in a conventional high-intensity conflict (HIC) is not terribly different from an A-10 conducting a CAS mission in an irregular warfare stability ops environment. Yes: there are differences (collateral damage estimates, etc. etc.), but the fundamentals are the same.
Not so with Army/Marine units. An old-school attack conducted by an infantry rifle company is very different from the new-school cordon and search. A battery volley of M26 MLRS rockets (each capable of destroying an entire 1 x 1 kilometer square on the ground) is very different from a low-yield GPS-guided rocket or Excalibur artillery round shot in Iraq most recently.
The effects of operating in a drastically changed operating environment can be seen even at the unit level: Army units will spend half a year training up for a deployment in COIN and stability tasks, and then spend a year executing those tasks. When they come home, they unlearn everything so they can regain their competencies at fighting a conventional warfare fight (or HIC or major combat operations -- the label is not important). Then, when a deployment appears on the horizon, gears shift back towards irregular warfare and COIN/stability ops.
But this is delving into a topic that can be its own blog post. Let's get back to the recommended reading.
One of the books on Gentile's list is Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost its War by James H. Wilbanks. I have not read this book (yet), but the blurb on Amazon.com indicates that it is a study of our Vietnamization policy and the argument that it was "designed to transfer full responsibility for the defense of South Vietnam to the South Vietnamese, but in a way that would buy the United States enough time to get out with appearing to run away."
The very obvious question is this: is there an analog to today's situation in Iraq? Is Operation NEW DAWN a modern day "Iraqization"? Right now, there is a lot of political pressure in favor of us just pulling everyone the hell out, but I would like to see if anyone has put any serious academic or analytical thought into what the projected security environment in Iraq will be when we "leave" in 2011...
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