Having read Rob's excellent post, I went back to Dr. Ucko's article and gave it another look. As I was reading, it struck me that much of his argument is based on an historical survey whose population is one.

Dr. Ucko, along with many, many others, have claimed that the US military has 'historically' turned away from counterinsurgency as soon as possible and returned to the study of conventional war. This, they argue, is a subject our generals are much more comfortable with - with the added benefit that conventional warfighting produces much bigger budgets, quicker promotions, more toys for the boys, etc. I believe this is a false premise based on bad history.

Firstly, with a few exceptions of relatively short duration, the regular military forces of the United States were organized, trained, and funded for employment in Small Wars until just before the Second World War. They were never - never - prepared to fight conventional wars until the baloon actually went up. In the 1920's and 1930's, it was the rebels and deep thinkers who argued we needed to buy bombers and tanks, to think about the impact of mechanization or to train for amphibious warfare. From 1783 to 1935 or so, peacetime armies were small, and employed largely in counterinsurgency, civil support, or stability operations. Training for 'conventional' war was the exception, not the rule, and rarely done above the regimental level.

After 1945 came Vietnam. We were ill-prepared for this counter-insurgency, but one should remember that it had been 60 years since the Army's last major counterinsurgency campaign, with three major conventional wars intervening. Moreover, most of the military's intellectual energy over the preceding decade had been spent on trying to envision what the nuclear battlefield would look like, a question that was arguably of greater import at the time. Finally, Vietnam was a very different war from the ones we had fought against the Indians, the Huks, or a variety of banana republics.

After Vietnam, the military institution did turn away from COIN as a subject of study; or, to be more accurate, we turned the problem over to a miltary ghetto known as the SF community while the rest of us got on with preparing for high-intensity, conventional warfare. However, there were 180 good reasons to do this, in the form of Soviet divisions poised from Potsdam to Omsk.

Now, it can be argued that after the Gulf War (v.1.0) we could have or should have turned our intellectual and material energies to preparing for the types of war most likely to occur in a world where we had no peer competitors. One can also convincingly argue that our leaders failed to anticipate or prepare for the specific course of events in Iraq and Afghanistan following their initial conventional phases. You can also criticize the institution for a slow adjustment to conditions on the ground. All of those positions are defensible and more or less true. But to say that consciously abandoning hard-won COIN lessons is some sort of American military tradition is a strawman based on a single case in our long history.

Two last comments. Firstly, The reason why we are not faced with the realistic prospect of a conventional war is because we are so well-prepared to fight one - a truism so self-evident many intellectuals have trouble grasping it.

Secondly, how likely is it that we will engage in another Iraq within the lifetime of our current crop of officers? How much sense does it make to remold our military institutions to fight counterinsurgencies when it may take another couple of decades to muster the political will to do so?