Posted yesterday on the Thomas P.M. Barnett Blog - New COIN is Progress, Not Perfection.

OP-ED: "Counterinsurgency, by the Book: The Pentagon's new manual won't solve our Iraq problems," by Richard H. Shultz Jr. And Andrea J. Dew, New York Times, 7 August 2006, p. A21.

Two academics who've studied insurgencies take Dave Petraeus' and Jim Mattis' draft Counter-Insurgency field manual to task for not having enough operational and tactical models for identifying and working the fractured landscape of bad actors we're likely to meet in Gap states afflicted by civil strife.

Despite declaring the FM an "encyclopedic 241-page review of insurgencies that took place in the 20th century and an alphabetical list of the tools of counterinsurgency," they dismiss it somewhat as merely "an introductory course in the history of insurgency and counterinsurgency."

Their criticisms (lack of more distinct profiles of factions typically lumped under the rubric of insurgents, model for categorizing these groups' operational tendencies, and an intell model for digging up actionable intelligence) all seem like logical next steps, none of which I think Mattis or Petraeus would deny (though I'd be interested in their opinions--as well as that of others--to this criticism).

I will confess I'm not sure of the FM's normal purview on such TTPs (tactics, techniques and procedures), but I believe that such details are typically covered in TTP-specific docs.

Whether or not I'm assuming correctly on that score, I will say that I'm not surprised this new FM amounts to an intro course. The Army and Marines so purged Vietnam from their doctrine and thinking in the past 30 years, that such a re-educational tone in this first draft FM designed to reverse that long tide stikes me a rather natural progression.

Fast enough for the academics? No. But they're fine to push hard. As they note here, until well into 2005, our forces in Iraq weren't making themselves smart enough on the varied cast of characters in play (militias, jihadists, gangs, former regimers, etc.) to take advantage of possible fissures.

So the learning and growing smarter continues...