The Col. Gentile collection and debate

[SteveMetz]

Eating Soup with a Spoon - Lieutenant Colonel Gian Gentile, Armed Forces Journal

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." In fact, I think there is an inverse correlation between the extent to which we approach a counterinsurgency campaign as warfighting and the success we meet (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, El Salvador).

I'll be interested to see how the debate unfolds on the AFJ discussion board.