I look at it this way. COIN is a military operation to defeat an insurgency. Most of the recommended literature today seems to be geared towards (a) understanding the insurgency or (b) figuring out how to combat it. I'd say the literature on those two angles is pretty exhaustive, which begs the question of why we continue to suck so bad at it.

I read through Kilcullen's book the first weekend that it came out and it, in my opinion, was 200+ pages of common sense backed up with anecdotes and citations. The whole time that I read reading it, I was waiting for the punch line. It never arose. I was nodding in agreement throughout, "yeah, we do this, yeah it results in that, yeah it's an annoying paradox... and...?"

I think Nagl was starting down the right path in Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife. Many view that book as a history piece on Vietnam and Malaysia. It was actually a book about how Armies adapt. Being perhaps among the first to tackle that topic using contemporary case studies, it surely has some errors or shortcomings (unlikely that someone is going to get it right on the first try). Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that many have picked up where he left off or spent much time revisiting the idea of how the Army adapted. Most of the criticism, praise, and follow-up has been focused on the historical analysis, even though it was not history book. I would recommend books that pick up where he left off. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any. All of the bright ideas on COIN are neat, but I think the biggest obstacle is our inability to apply them. We need to crack that nut first.