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seydlitz89, the clausewitzian analyst and former Marine Corps officer and US Army intelligence officer who wrote articles in the past for Dr. Chet Richard’s DNI site and participated in two Chicago Boyz Roundtables ( Clausewitz and Xenophon), is now blogging at Milpub.

Here is seydlitz89’s most recent post where he asks some tough questions about how US/NATO strategy in Afghanistan comports with classical COIN theory and a basic need for intellectual coherence:

The Current Crisis in US Counterinsurgency

….To me the crisis reflects much deeper issues. Some of these have to do with the contradictions between the actual theory of Counterinsurgency Warfare as developed by David Galula, and the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which are presented to the American people as counterinsurgencies (from our perspective) but are not. This confusion in strategic theory and strategy in turn feeds the political confusion on the US side. What is sorely missing is a honest disclosure of what our actual political purposes are and the best way seen to achieve them.In 1964, a professional French Army officer named David Galula had published a short, but first-rate book on strategic theory entitled Counterinsurgency Warfare. Galula’s conclusion based on his own experiences in Greece, Indochina, China and Algeria, was that to be successful against Revolutionary Warfare (read Maoist-influenced strategies of insurgency), the established state would have to adopt a specific form of warfare based on the realities of this type of conflict, or “counterinsurgency warfare”. Galula’s approach while very coherent and compatible with Clausewitz’s general theory, is specific to a certain political context and thus limited in applicability since the strengths and weaknesses he ascribes to each side refer to this specific political context.

Read the rest here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 4:20 pm and is filed under 21st century, Afghanistan, al qaida, America, army, COIN, counterinsurgency, Failed State, ideas, insurgency, intellectuals, islamist, military, national security, strategy, Strategy and War, theory, war. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.