Hi Steve,

Quote Originally Posted by SteveMetz View Post
I, of course, take issue with the basic premise of the article. I believe we treat counterinsurgency as a variant of war not because that is the most strategically effective approach, but because we have been unable to transcend Cold War thinking. We know how to fight wars. We're good at it. So we pretend that things not amenable to warfighting are, in fact, war. It's a classic example of the old adage "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
I'm not sure if I agree with your sketch of the causal logic, but I certainly agree with your "act as if" conclusion; at least for the institution qua institution. Still and all, I find Gentile's logic flawed. In particular, the following paragraph really bothers me.

Yet the paradoxes actually deceive by making overly simple the reality of counterinsurgency warfare and why it is so hard to conduct it at the ground level for the combat soldier. The eminent scholar and strategic thinker Eliot Cohen noted that counterinsurgency war is still war, and war in its essence is fighting. In trying to teach its readers to eat soup with a knife, the COIN manual discards the essence and reality of counterinsurgency warfare fighting, thereby manifesting its tragic flaw.
Let me pull this apart.

Yet the paradoxes actually deceive by making overly simple the reality of counterinsurgency warfare and why it is so hard to conduct it at the ground level for the combat soldier.
I would suggest that the use of paradoxes is a) quite normal in getting anyone to perceive a new viewpoint, b) inherently "simple" in presentation but complex in "unfolding", and c) only deceitful when they contradict already internalized paradoxes (e.g. "Peace through superior firepower", etc.). Anyone who has read any of the major works one Rites of Passage (or symbolism for that matter) knows that paradoxes are crucial in shifting a person from one role to another (the "why's" take much longer to explain, but are partly covered in a previous post of mine). That being said, this sentence is a strawman.

The eminent scholar and strategic thinker Eliot Cohen noted that counterinsurgency war is still war, and war in its essence is fighting.
A truly fascinating example of mixing a resort to "traditional authority (in the Weberian sense) with really poor logic. First, the appeal to "traditional authority" - imply that you are quoting, without quoting (or referencing), a scholar. The second point about poor logic is a touch trickier.

Gentile relies on an appeal to traditional authority to define "counterinsurgency war" as "war". The fact that they are perceived as somehow different, shown by the use of "counterinsurgency" as a modifier, appears to be irrelevant to Gentile who proceeds to assert an essence, in the philosophical sense, to "war" and, by a backwards chain of logic, assert the primacy of the same essence to "counterinsurgency war". This neatly avoids the annoying little point that "counterinsurgency war" is perceptually (and linguistically and doctrinally) defined as an intersection set of two classes: counterinsurgency and war. Where is the second "essence"? This brings us to

In trying to teach its readers to eat soup with a knife, the COIN manual discards the essence and reality of counterinsurgency warfare fighting, thereby manifesting its tragic flaw.
Given the strawman and illogical "logic" already used, this conclusion is both unavoidable and, at the same time, tragically flawed. What he has missed is that FM 3-24 is, in fact, attempting to define the "essence" if you will of "counterinsurgency", not "war" (i.e. his missed class), and to show the intersection with "war".