... If Tolstoy is right, then what we call counterinsurgency is doomed to fail, and the Army and the Marines wasted their time drafting a
new field manual last year, and the surge, based on counterinsurgency strategy, is wasting American lives. The conservative military analyst Edward Luttwak makes this argument in a
recent essay in Harper's, showing how parts of the left and the right have converged in the wake of Iraq. Luttwak says that only a Nazi-like brutality against insurgents and civilians ever put an insurgency down, and that America is unwilling to go to such an extreme.
David Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency expert I
wrote about last December, recently took time off from serving as an adviser to General David Petraeus in Baghdad to
rebut Luttwak’s critique.
Who’s right? The argument is couched in fairly technical military terms, but the outcome has the most profound political implications. Should America learn the same lesson in Iraq that we took from Vietnam—never do this again? Or should we learn to do it better? Should we scrap Field Manual 3-24 and return to training for conventional warfare? Should we get rid of
this State Department office, the government’s one feeble attempt thus far to improve what is called, almost always derisively, nation building? Should we stay out of wars except when they require air power and huge armored divisions? Should we stop sending police experts to help rebuild shattered states? Where does that leave Bosnia? Afghanistan? Darfur?...
Partisan Warfare
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