zenpundit.com

Article quotes SWC/SWJ stalwarts ( Hat tip to Menning)

Army Focus on Counterinsurgency Debated Within

“What I saw was an Army that was not as ready to fight this kind of war as it should have been, and so I came back from Iraq determined to help the Army learn how to fight this kind of war more effectively,” Nagl says.

He began helping write the Army’s counterinsurgency handbook, better known as Field Manual 3-24. The manual is like a roadmap for officers: It emphasizes the use of minimal force. The idea in a counterinsurgency campaign, Nagl says, is to drive a wedge between the civilian population and insurgents who live among them.

….Col. Sean MacFarland was among the first to successfully apply counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq in 2006. And yet he was a co-author of the recent internal Army report suggesting that the Army is far too focused on counterinsurgency training. This singular focus, he writes, is weakening the Army.

The report cites field artillery as an example of an area that has suffered from inattention. Since 1775, artillery units have served as the backbone of the U.S. Army. But today, a stunning 90 percent of these units are unqualified to fire artillery accurately – the lowest level in history.

MacFarland declined to be interviewed for this story. But views like his have been amplified publicly by an iconoclastic, Berkeley-educated officer, Lt. Col. Gian Gentile.

“Due to five years in Iraq and six years in Afghanistan, I believe that the U.S. Army has become a counterinsurgency-only force,” Gentile said recently during a public lecture in Washington. He also declined to comment for this story.

Gentile, who served two tours in Iraq, is perhaps the most outspoken internal critic of what he calls the Army’s dangerous obsession with counterinsurgency.

“The high public profile of the new counterinsurgency manual, combined with the perception that its use and practice with the surge in Iraq has lowered the violence, I think has had a Svengali effect on us,” Gentile said during the lecture. “It’s almost like we have a secret recipe for success now involving counterinsurgency and irregular war.”

Top Billing! – Ben Smith/POLITICO “Clinton: OPEC ‘can no longer be a cartel’”

WTF???? Hillary Clinton: Megalomaniac or the living entelechy of Insincerity. You decide.

No Quarter -“Stomp on This?”

Equal time. Good Freaking Lord – Bill Ayers makes Reverend Wright look like a Bircher.  Hat tip to Pundita.

MountainRunner -“U.S. Public Diplomacy Update: nothing new to report”

Could we possibly get Matt get confirmed in the next administration?

SWJ Blog – “Sunday Light Reading”

Well selected pieces, as usual. From Algeria to El Salvador – I like case studies.

Thomas P.M. Barnett -“We also need connectivity with foreign militaries”

I like how Tom explicitly differentiated between unilateral and aggregate Core Sys Admin capability. I’ve always understood Sys Admin that way but I think it’s often been left to be fairly ambiguous, perhaps on purpose.

Fabius Maximus – “Secretary Gates would be a hero, if speeches could reform DoD”

FM not only uses me as a foil but puts me into an odd trio with a portly Neoconservative tanker and Abu Muqawama’s co-blogger, the self-proclaimed “Angelina Jolie of COIN”. I’m not really certain what this means.

John Robb is at work on a new book.

Congratulations to my friend Dan of tdaxp for the publication of his monograph, Revolutionary Strategies in Early Christianity.  Never one to shrink from controversy, Dan applied a radical military theory to analyze  the origins of an ancient religion beloved by something over a billion people. I received my PDF copy today and already started reading it this afternoon. A review is pending.

That’s it!