General invite to attend undergraduate COIN course via Skype & in person

[Meh]

Wow. Thank you very everyone for the lively responses. This is wonderful.

Not really. But no matter, your class of course but the point to me on CORDS is that doing the right thing at the wrong time doesn't count -- it is imperative that a major power's military force be prepared for operations in diverse locales and in various scenarios and just as important that the rest of government be prepared to do their part.

Go on. I'm keen to follow this Vietnam conversation through. What did you mean by "not really"? Sorry if my language in the previous post was unclear; I trying to make the same point about "right thing at the wrong time". Where are we missing each other?

Toby, why not just state, that there is nothing useful to be had from comparing the two conflicts. It's like comparing Korea with the Boer War. Two completely different conflicts.

There's always something useful to be had from gaining any two conflicts. We, for once this semester, will have some time for historical comparison in this class. The fact that Malaya was a rural war makes it a prime candidate for comparison. So does the ostensible difference Brits/Yanks. Of course I could have chosen a myriad others (you'll notice that I worked in Aden) but, to be blunt about the reasons for comparing Malaya to Vietnam: I want my co-teacher - an extremely talented sophomore(!) - to teach that class and he happens to have read Nagl .

Looks and interesting course, but where is the Clausewitz, or even the Kitson? Nothing on Northern Ireland? No Colin Gray - Another Bloody Century? I submit that these may merit some serious attention.

I'll post the syllabus of my previous course sometime soon as a basis for comparison. Kitson was in there. A guest lecture gave us Clausewtiz. Gray wasn't in there, because it was a retrospective course.

Remember that my audience was (and still is) novice undergraduates with no knowledge of military studies. The goal was to teach them the basic tenets of COIN. Those basic principles are, IMHO, timeless. I remember how often I said "remember that from war x?" that semester. It became repetitive to cram every conflict in when the lessons were largely the same. Great as a history survey course. But too few chances to practice and internalise the principles. Picking best-ofs seemed in order - and picking those is of course not going to please everyone (/anyone).

This is ideally a two-part course. You can teach basic COIN in two semesters. That was my original intent: make this an advanced class for those who've studied the history of COIN in my previous course or elsewhere. Tufts vetoed this at the last minute and I had to figure out ways to make this accessible to novices. There are many disadvantages to this change. The advantage is that class enrolment is more than single digits. I recently spoke to a Tufts professor about undergraduate interest in COIN, who stated that there are a lot of students who fancy themselves as knowing about COIN, but very few who are willing to properly study it. Lower the entry requirements, and you double the number of students (since few have the prerequisites).

Regardless of that and all due respect, it seems to have it's routes very much in the US "sudden learning of COIN", rather than in bones of a very traditional and well covered form of warfare.

The syllabus only covers the readings. It doesn't cover what I intend to discuss in class. The fact that COIN significantly predates OIF/OEF is quite important and will be mentioned frequently, but this semester a practical 'toolbox' is more important than detailed knowledge of history. The exciting thing about the class format is that we can (re-)discover COIN as the US does in Iraq. Obviously the suppression of COIN prior to 2003 will factor in since it's the cause of the re-discovery process.

My one piece of advice is for you to challenge your students to look past the vignettes and the conclusions of "experts," and to take their own journey to to attempt to get deeper into the question of why such conflicts occur in general, and what aspects of the relationship between the distinct populaces and governments that you study caused these factors to manifest in violence, and then, to look at how all this combined with the total environment and military/insurgent actions and reactions to lead to what was then captured in history. This might be hard if your syllabus is too much like the Platte river: A mile wide and an inch deep.

Cheers for bringing this up. That lesson I definitely learned teaching the first time round. To understand COIN, there has to be much, much more than plain history lectures and the occasional paper. This class will constantly challenge students to test principles. Written assignments will take lessons and principles, and throw students a fast ball (e.g. the improvement in COIN conduct as described by William Owen in this thread - sometimes the best TTPs are of no use if the macro-political part is going down the drain). Everything about COIN will be up for questioning. One thing I'm keen to point out to students over and over is that insurgencies are simply the violent end of the spectrum of political subversion. The first sentence of my course description asks,
"What is a greater threat--a man with a bomb or another handing out cash to the poor?"
A little hammy, I know, but it gets the point across (or at least raises the question). At the same time, this course is designed to fill a gap. If regular Tufts classes are going to explain one thing well, it's the socio-political origins of insurgencies. What they fail at miserably is the conduct of war (in fact, that's true for insurgencies as much as conventional warfare). I had a rather lively debate with a Peace and Justice Studies professor yesterday who will teach you about inequalities until the cows come home, but has absolutely no idea how hearts & minds works in practice. The military is utterly alien to him beyond baby killing and blowing stuff up.
So, I'm trying to balance teaching purely the aspects that are neglected by Tufts with teaching holistically (and repeating some things they'll learn in other classes). The course becomes mechanical if I focus too much on the former, and superfluous if I focus too much on the latter.

One final point about the class: I'm also trying to counteract what I perceive as delusions of grandeur in academic environments. Students and academics focus such a great deal on strategic studies that you'd think they're off to run a country or two. They're happy to play president and general but not Lieutenant and Sergeant. Well, what are they going to be after they graduate (of course the academics are never going to be anything)?
Stating this is probably going to cause a ruckus, but I believe one reason we got off to a messy start in Iraq is because the US and UK were led by a bunch of people who'd done a whole lot of strategic studies and had no idea of the realities on the ground. And it starts on the campuses they attended. So that, to me, is another excellent reason to focus on the tactical and operational level for most of the course.

If you're interested in getting the co-author online to participate, let me know.

Niel Smith

(also featured in CH 7 of West - company performance in Tal Afar)

Absolutely!!! Once I'm back at my computer, there'll be a pm inbound to you at the speed of a thousand greased gazelles.