The traditional, often bitter inter-service battle for resources has been taken to a new level in a senior Air Force officer’s recent assault on service doctrine. In late December, 2007, Air University published a 111-page monograph written by Air Force Deputy Judge Advocate Major General Charles J. Dunlap, Jr. entitled Shortchanging the Joint Fight? An Airman’s Assessment of FM 3-24 and the Case for Developing Truly Joint COIN Doctrine. The study analyzes the pitfalls of accepting Army and Marine tactical doctrine as the joint solution and offers an Airman’s perspective to deliver “fresh” alternatives for joint counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine development. This heavily referenced monograph (438 end notes) relentlessly attacks the Army and Marine Corps doctrine for its almost exclusively ground-centric perspective and failure to reconcile the full potential of today’s airpower capabilities. Although General Dunlap discusses several interesting ideas regarding how the Airman’s perspective can help shape joint COIN doctrine, his undue criticisms of Army philosophies, conventional approaches and dogmatic mindset distract from his argument and recommendations. Readers will likely focus exclusively on the unwarranted and erratically referenced land-power condemnations and accuse the Air Force of advocating a COIN solution that involves Airmen or airpower for their own sake, which the author half-heartedly adds as an imperative at the end of the essay. This Airman’s assessment of “an Airman’s Assessment” will provide an alternative perspective of Field Manual 3-24 and offer counter arguments to many of the monograph’s criticisms...
Shortchanging the Joint Doctrine Fight
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