Info Wars
Castle Argghhh!!! with a thoughtful post on how the battle goes in Afghanistan, what the Taliban doesn’t want you to know, true martyrdom and the soft underbelly of democracies in a long war.
Related, Dilegge at Small Wars Journal with All Counterinsurgency is Local.
SWJ also points to what looks like an interesting milblog, Building Peace, and this thoughtful rave recommendation of a post on Nagl’s Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam:
It’s been a bumpy but exciting ride, watching the Army become a “learning organization” over the past two years. By mid-2006, as a C-17 pilot and International Relations student who was living and breathing the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, I was in total despair. I’d lost faith in most of the leaders and institutions I was serving. With Iraq embroiled in sectarian violence and teetering over the abyss of civil war, Air Force commanders continued to give me pep talks about how “they slept better at night” knowing that we were making the world safe from terrorists. In 2007 I watched a “motivational” briefing in a rapidly deteriorating Afghanistan by a high-ranking AFCENT general. He wowed us with slides tallying bombs dropped, sorties flown, targets destroyed–all the wrong metrics for fighting a counterinsurgency. That summer, when I attended Squadron Officer School, we learned all about how to plan a strategic air campaign like we fought in Desert Storm–and never discussed counterinsurgency. My deployed squadron played a supporting role in Israel’s disastrous 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. I was living history, and despite the cheerleading from some of my colleagues, I knew this was a dark chapter of history that Israel, the US, and Lebanon would all deeply regret. As my knowledge of international affairs deepened, my trust in my leadership eroded.
Then something happened. New names started to appear in the news. David Petraeus. John Nagl. David Kilcullen. H.R. McMaster. Paul Yingling. A new counterinsurgency manual was released, and the process of its creation was as revolutionary as the manual itself; the military invited participation from NGOs, lawyers, academics, and anyone else they could find. Secretary Gates entered the scene, talking loudly about the need to build up soft power and demilitarize American foreign policy. New media like Small Wars Journal sprang up, giving all these young revolutionary officers a place to put their heads together–and they were saying things that made sense. They got it. I read about a counterinsurgency school in Afghanistan, run by a Captain–a Captain!–who’d studied terrorism at Oxford. To make things even better, all these big new names were beginning to get promoted.
The Army has done a remarkable job transforming itself into a learning organization. I’m encouraged that Nagl’s book found such a widespread audience in the Army, and that his lessons about building learning organizations were codified in FM 3-24. I don’t believe the Army is “there” on its COIN doctrine–big debates still rage on, and there are probably other debates we SHOULD be having–but that’s not really the point. The point is that the Army is institutionalizing processes that allow good ideas to rise to the top. I believe my own service, the Air Force, has a ways to go, but I’m confident it will get there.
Topics: Afghanistan, military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:40 am Comments (0) on Monday, December 29, 2008
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