The Col. Gentile collection and debate

[Shek]

I found LTC Gentile's piece to be less than compelling. For example, the paradoxes are seemingly presented as limiting thought and providing a straightjacket, in direct contrast to the manual's introduction to the paradoxes that:

These paradoxes are offered to stimulate thinking, not to limit it. The applicability of the thoughts behind the paradoxes depends on a sense of the local situation and, in particular, the state of the insurgency. For example, the admonition “Sometimes, the More Force Used, the Less Effective It Is” does not apply when the enemy is “coming over the barricades”; however, that thought is applicable when increased security is achieved in an area. In short, these paradoxes should not be reduced to a
checklist; rather, they should be used with considerable thought.

If a senior officer is unable to use these paradoxes to stimulate thinking and instead reduces them for "chic" quotes in a media interview, I find it less an indictment of the paradoxes and more an indictment of an officer education system and promotion system that has allowed officers to advance in the ranks that haven't learned how to think.

Another passage that troubled me was:

The logic of the contradiction that "tactical success guarantees nothing," though, tells the reader he should not be enamored with tactical success because if he achieves it without success in other areas of COIN operations, such as essential services and governance, then it accomplishes nothing.

In this case, the paradox doesn't state that tactical successes accomplish nothing, simply that they guarantee nothing. Yet, the implied reading of the paradox doesn't stop here, and a slippery slope then follows to where lieutenants (and lieutenant colonels) reading this paradox shouldn't be that concerned about tactics since they are not important in and of themselves.

However, the paradox never states that tactical successes are unimportant; instead, it simply highlights that tactical actions don't exist in a vacuum and must be connected to operational and strategic objectives as well as host nation political objectives. Fighting isn't removed from the equation; it just isn't the only thing, and as the introduction to the paradoxes states, the application of the paradoxes, and in this case, the mix of tactical (kinetic)/non-kinetic depends on "a sense of the local situation."

Finally, I found the following passage to be highly ironic since Eliot Cohen was the co-author of Principles, Imperatives, and Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency.

Yet the paradoxes actually deceive by making overly simple the reality of counterinsurgency warfare and why it is so hard to conduct it at the ground level for the combat soldier. The eminent scholar and strategic thinker Eliot Cohen noted that counterinsurgency war is still war, and war in its essence is fighting. In trying to teach its readers to eat soup with a knife, the COIN manual discards the essence and reality of counterinsurgency warfare fighting, thereby manifesting its tragic flaw.