SWJED
04-27-2006, 08:39 AM
From Colonel Lang at the Sic Semper Tyrannis blog - Emerging Counterinsurgency Doctrine (http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2006/04/emerging_counte.html).
As we have been discussing here, the subject of "Counterinsurgency" is the flavor of the month in the Army and Marine Corps. People who could not spell "Counterinsurgency" three years ago are now busy reading TE Lawrence, Mao Tse-Tung and even more obscure texts from the corpus of "Counterinsurgency" literature. A political appointee in the DoD recently asked me with great and serious solicitude if I had ever seen "The Battle of Algiers." The implication was that seeing this movie would make all clear.
It often happens that desperation leads to a willingness to listen to people who would, in other circumstances, never get an official hearing. As General (Retired) Keane said on the Newshour a while back, the army that he ran went into Iraq without a clue on "Counterinsurgency." It is now playing "catch-up" in its own ponderous, committee-bound, acronym, and general officer burdened way. The US Marines seem better at such problems of intellectual introspection, somehow.
In this muddle of frustrated brooding, a cogently written document on "Counterinsurgency" has an enormous appeal as a kind of "open sesame!" It helps if that document actually informs.
The writings of this Australian are now the flavor of the week. Good!
He links to Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency (http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/pdf/kilcullen_28_articles.pdf) by David Kilcullen.
BTW - got a nice e-mail from LTC Kilcullen - he is a fan of the Small Wars Journal and is currently working on a follow-on to 28 Articles that will appear in the Marine Corps Gazette and Military Review.
As we have been discussing here, the subject of "Counterinsurgency" is the flavor of the month in the Army and Marine Corps. People who could not spell "Counterinsurgency" three years ago are now busy reading TE Lawrence, Mao Tse-Tung and even more obscure texts from the corpus of "Counterinsurgency" literature. A political appointee in the DoD recently asked me with great and serious solicitude if I had ever seen "The Battle of Algiers." The implication was that seeing this movie would make all clear.
It often happens that desperation leads to a willingness to listen to people who would, in other circumstances, never get an official hearing. As General (Retired) Keane said on the Newshour a while back, the army that he ran went into Iraq without a clue on "Counterinsurgency." It is now playing "catch-up" in its own ponderous, committee-bound, acronym, and general officer burdened way. The US Marines seem better at such problems of intellectual introspection, somehow.
In this muddle of frustrated brooding, a cogently written document on "Counterinsurgency" has an enormous appeal as a kind of "open sesame!" It helps if that document actually informs.
The writings of this Australian are now the flavor of the week. Good!
He links to Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency (http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/pdf/kilcullen_28_articles.pdf) by David Kilcullen.
BTW - got a nice e-mail from LTC Kilcullen - he is a fan of the Small Wars Journal and is currently working on a follow-on to 28 Articles that will appear in the Marine Corps Gazette and Military Review.