New Interagency COIN Manual
New Interagency COIN Manual - SWJ Blog.
Quote:
Via e-mail, an Inside the Pentagon report of a new Interagency COIN manual in the works:
The State Department is leading an effort to issue a draft version of a counterinsurgency guide in the next four to six weeks to help Washington-based government agencies and departments defeat future subversive movements. A final doctrine is expected next year.
The effort follows last year's Army and Marine Corps manual on the same subject.
The new guide -- "Counterinsurgency for U.S. Government Policymakers: A Work in Progress" -- is an educational, strategic-level primer for senior policymakers, according to a State Department official in the bureau of political-military affairs...
You're posing the questions....
but it's also based on the assumption that training is a zero-sum game. Either-or. Personally, I think that's the kind of institutional thinking that led to COIN being neglected in the first place and created the need for something like 3-24 to shake up things. But I do agree with Marc in the observation that its long-term impact has a very good chance of being limited.
The situation is very similar to what we saw on an institutional level during Vietnam. Training adjusted to prepare soldiers (to a degree, depending on time frame and branch) for what they'd encounter in Vietnam...but once the conflict started spinning down training switched back to conventional warfare. This also happened during the Indian Wars (although training at the most basic level was never re-oriented to prepare soldiers for what they'd encounter on the frontier...even though this was the only war they had; most advanced training took place within the regiment or company) and just about every other conflict we've had. The institution prefers preparing for large-scale conventional warfare, so that's where the reflexive bias lies.
Will we forget COIN theory again? I certainly hope not. Does that mean the entire Army should focus on COIN? No, but there is no good reason to allow the ideas and practices to slide into the dustbin once we're out of Iraq and Afghanistan (or once the deployments become small enough to be ignored on the larger institutional level).