The Col. Gentile collection and debate

[Jedburgh]

I'd be curious to see what he has to say regarding what's been posted to date.....

Here's another view of Gentile's perspective on COIN:

....I went to this event at the Heritage Foundation this morning, titled "When Do You Know You're Winning? Combating Insurgencies - Past, Present, and Future." You can watch video or listen to the mp3 of it yourself if you want to - everything was on the record....

...the truly alarming thing was LTC Gian Gentile's presentation. LTC Gentile commanded a battalion in Baghdad up until a few weeks ago and is now a professor at West Point. He gave a rundown of the metrics he used. I'll list them in the order he presented them, which according to him is the order of importance:

Security:
- Body count (which he acknowledged as "backwards" but justified by referencing some Eliot Cohen article in 2006 that argued "counterinsurgency is still war, and war's essential element is fighting")
- Number of times he is attacked (he wants it to be as low as possible)
- Number of dead bodies found on the street
- Sectarian makeup of Iraqi units he's partnered with
- Number of local tips he gets
- Number of enemy captured

Governance:
- Opening shops on the main street
- Keeping useful local leaders alive
- "Normal" activity of people
- Willingness of Sunnis to travel across Baghdad
- Essential services, employment levels

These seem to be great metrics if your first priority is leaving Iraq with as many soldiers as possible, with little regard to the situation you are leaving to the guys relieving you. It is conducive to holing up in your Forward Operating Base and leaving only to react to events. There is no mention of the local political situation that the security situation is supposed to be oriented around. Furthermore he has as "metrics" things which aren't even nominally under his control, such as the makeup of Iraqi units and the willingness of Sunnis to travel in other commanders' Areas of Responsibility. His emphasis on body count as his primary metric was especially depressing - supposedly we had learned that was a poor metric back in Vietnam (and probably earlier).

LTC Gentile did say some useful things however - he pointed out that the situation can't be measured by quantifiable variables, and that gut feeling and judgment are the overriding variables, and that progress should be presented in a narrative form rather than through graphs, etc. However I was left with a fair amount of questions...

Bolded phrase reflects an aspect of the reported brief that is identical to the article currently under discussion.