Porch shines a torch on COIN

[Madhu]

Douglas Porch at bookforum:

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_03/2750

Previously in another thread I mentioned an article by Matthew Cavanaugh, at West Point. The article is in Infinity Journal (and he is a student of Colin Gray's?)
and mentions that like only a few percent of West Point students take an elective in strategy.

https://www.infinityjournal.com/arti..._Adaptability/

I also think that until fairly recently, for the American military, Saudi-US-Israel alliance against Iran and our old security relationships in AfPak from the Soviet times blinded us to alternate narratives. We really believed some strange mythology related to our time in Afghanistan countering the Soviets, or, at least, American military men and women of a certain generation.

State is pretty awful too. One should read some of the late Indian defense analyst B. Raman's writing on the subject of State and its weird clientitis in the region. It's stunning. To back it up with American arguments, you can look at the arguments by John Glenn during the early 90s.

Plus, I am sorry to say, money and the making of it via contracts in DC pretty much runs a lot of our foreign policy and this supports bad military thinking and strategy.

PS: A nice supplement to the Gray article is the interview by Harry Summers I have been posting around here:

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/con.../summers2.html

Sorry my comments are so disjointed, I'm in a rush. I may clean them up later.