His book attempts to sway the reader away from the conventional warfare Jominian dogma. You should fight for the popular support instead of physical destruction- and win at the moral level, eroding the insurgents ability to move and interact so freely.

Winning at the moral level is hard to define and harder to do. Obviously we failed to that during the Vietnam War with our massive bombings and relentless pursuit of higher body counts. I’ll still argue it wasn’t the tools (bombers, artillery, etc.), but the application of the tools, or strategy. West Pointers have traditionally been terrible at formulating strategies, beginning with our Civil War where we somehow hold certain Generals in high esteem for leading their Armies to slaughter. Let’s not forget our military strategy is a by product of our industrial superiority, which makes us particularly unsuited to wage wars where we’re not able to destroy another Nation State’s fielded forces.

Getting back on to Iraq, your arguments don’t ring true to me because the conflict in Iraq isn't a true COIN, since we're still in the midst of regime change, nor is Iraq some simple banana republic host to a Marxist insurgency where the insurgency springs up from the soil based on economic disparities creating a base susceptible to Marxist ideology. This is the type of insurgency we have all studied, and now (after the fact) have great strategic and operational ideas for addressing this type of challenge.

However, we’re on the verge of making the same mistakes we made in Vietnam by failing to understand the true nature of the war. If we simply think we’re going to apply counter-Marxist/Maoist strategy to tackle this threat, then we’ll probably be reading about ourselves in the history books a few years from now on how we miss read the situation once again. The conflict in Iraq is a confluence of religion, ideological, economical, outside agitators, and ethnic tensions. Saddam was left in place by President Bush senior because he saw Saddam as the lesser of two evils, one who was actually a stabilizing influence who managed to keep Pandora’s Box closed. Sometimes the high moral ground is a chose between the lesser of two evils.

Now that Pandora’s Box is open we need to start thinking pragmatically instead of continuing to promote idealistically based strategies that have little application in the real world. As you stated, we need to learn how to think, not what to think.

In Iraq the winning at the moral level needs to be defined, and not by Sun Tsu, but by someone familiar with the world we live in today. Once it is defined, we have to determine how to translate it into action at the strategic and operational level. These are far from simple tasks. We can quote authors from Sun Tzu to Kaplan, but it won’t get us there.

Do you really believe that if we loaded our tanks up on ships in Kuwait and sent them back to Texas that Iraq would be better off? Do you think lightly armed infantry in cities with a dedicated foe supported by a number of nations and non-state entities will simply loose their will to carry on the conflict? That the Iraqi people will suddenly raise to the occasion and poison the pond making it untenable to the insurgents? Perhaps if we build a few more schools and medical clinics in various Iraqi cities in the Sunni dominated areas, then the Iraqis will suddenly see the light and embrace our form of democracy? Of course we can't provide adequate security for people to actually go to school in these areas yet, so I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry to get rid of our forces.

As for winning the war, does the military win the war, or do we establish conditions to enable another organization to win the war? What are the conditions? What organization actually wins it? If it is the Iraqi government, then what do we need to do to actually stand up an effective government? We’re far from figuring this one out, but I trust we will this time, because we have to.