Quote Originally Posted by Gian P Gentile View Post
I must have missed the class as Dr Tyrell states and I never really did get Foucault or Derrida because for the life of me I don’t get what he is telling me. I guess I just must be slow. No matter, I will restate my impression of the coin manual’s paradoxes when I was in combat in Iraq and based on reflection upon my return: my impression was that the paradoxes removed the essence of war which is fighting. You might disagree with what I have to say but I think the logic is pretty clear.
Conspicuous by its absence is any real logic (in the sense of reasoned argumentation) in this response. (Yearling USMA PY201 students would probably fail for an effort like this.) Also conspicuous by its absence is any attempt at rebuttal of my allegation of a category mistake in the article's subsumption of COIN under war. Category mistakes, btw, have been central issues in mainstream Western analytic Philosophy ever since Gilbert Ryle (a good old Oxford Don at Christ Church) coined the term in his 1949 Concept of Mind. Therefore, being confused by Foucault and Derrida (Continental philosophers of the "touchy-feely" sort) is not a good excuse, IMO. Actually the absence of any meaningful reclama or rebuttal discussion on this issue is fully understandable. It seems to indicate a blind spot in the author's conceptual schematism. For more on this topic, one might read the essay by Donald Davidson (another mainstream Anglo-American analytic philosopher of language so the Derrida dodge again won't work) "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," a response to WVO Quine's (Harvard logician) seminal essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism." Since LTC Gentile is at USMA, perhaps a trip to the second or third floors of Lincoln Hall for some remedial training in logic and critical thinking might be in order. As a minimum, I would suggest a close reading of Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought by David Hackett Fischer.

I argue that this entire construct is flawed. That by and large the American army has done pretty well in Iraq—even prior to the surge--with the strategic and political cards it was dealt.
Metrics are always tied to presumptions. If we accept the presumption that the Army's mission in Iraq has been to amass a body count, then I cannot disagree with the quoted claim. However, I tend to think that just accurately placing rounds on target is too narrow a view of the mission. Back in the days of SASO as an Army mission, racking up corpes was not a good metric for the success of that mission. And it still is not a good metric for SASO's replacement.
My article in fact threatens the intellectual base of the new coin doctrine because it calls its basic theoretical premises into question. Counterinsurgency war is not “armed social science” as Kilkullen has called it. Instead at its basic level is violence and death; this was my impression after a year in Baghdad.
This is a very telling statement about the author's preconceptions. What was witnessed was violence and death and the witness has choosen to describe this as "counterinsurgency war." However, what Kilcullen addresses is probably more like what Immanuel Kant calls a regulative ideal--not the state of thiings as they are but instead the future state of things that one is trying to attain. The article is a threat because it is reactionary, not because it is visionary. It seeks to turn back the hands of time, not move forward into a brave new world. I suspect that had people in the 18th Century taken the approach described in this rebuttal, then the world would still condone slavery and have many nations ruled under the pretense of the divine right of kings.

I will pose a counterfactual again that I posted last week on this blog: If the army had read books like Nagl’s before the war and trained and taken seriously coin operations would things be any different in iraq than they are now? If the army had focused predominantly on coin prior to 2003 would the march to Baghdad gone the same way?
This is a question that is misframed. It really does not matter how much training in COIN had been given prior to the start of OIF. What does matter is that the mission was assigned based on a misreading of the reality on the ground in Iraq. Apparently, senior leadership above the Service departments (and perhaps within them as well) did not forese the need for a COIN force after the regime change was effected. Instead, they seemed to believe that the swap out would be more like what happens between November and January after a Presidential election in the US.

To repeat, war is not “armed social science,” though many of you may want it to be.
War may not be "armed social science," but COIN is not necessarily war simpliciter. I submit that COIN is sui generis.