Undergraduate Student, Help w/Counterinsurgency Debate

[Gian P Gentile]

...Gian Gentile is a particularly effective advocate of the conventional side but one who does not reject COIN. He thinks we need to focus more on big wars. OK, I don't agree, but he has a point ... The problem with his postition, as I see it, is that if he wins the argument, small wars issues will - as they always have in the past - be shoved onto the back burner and we will have to learn how to fight them all over again (as if we had never seen them before)...

Lots of good discussion here, as usual on SWJ blog. I especially agreed with some of the comments made by Ken and Wilf on the need to have an army that is well trained in the basics of combat skills.

I disagree with Niel when he states that the killer instinct is there in coin and readily transferable to HIC. Yes this might be the case for combat platoons or companies like Niel's and where it was at and the level of kinetic fighting involved. But "killer instinct" is a complex and layered thing in a large fighting army. That is to say, the way a corps commander displays his "killer instinct" in HIC is through many extended combat functions like command and control, operational level logistics that are vulnerable to attack, and to use WILF's example of a night river crossing into the teeth of a well-laid defense. In this sense it is wrongheaded to think that our army over the last seven years can just pick up from Iraq and Astan and do a corps level movement to contact into the teeth of an enemy who fights and stands sort of like Hiz did in 2006.

To John T: Boy I certainly hope and pray that that is not what happens, that in maintaining our focus on the higher end of fighting we had better not ditch the hard lessons won on coin over the past seven years. To be clear, that would be a huge mistake and I really just don’t see it happening. John, I think that fear is hyped to a good degree by folks who called for a focus on coin in the 80s and 90s after Vietnam but were shoved to the sidelines. I think at some point we should let the past go, so to speak, and not be controlled by fears of what happened before will necessarily raise its head again. In short there is no conventional bogeymen waiting in the wings to bring the army back to 1985, build more M1 tanks, recall Don Holder to active duty to write a revised version of airland battle. That bogeyman is simply not there, nor is he me.

gian