Clearly I have struck a nerve in many of the readers of this blog. I will say up front that at least I reply to criticisms made of what I have to say when others of more fame and fortune than I and of rock star status clearly see themselves above the fray of this blog.

Admittedly this piece was written in evocative and impressionistic form. That is to say I wrote this piece from the premise of how the coin’s paradoxes appeared to me when I read it at the end of my combat tour in command of a combat battalion in west-baghdad in 2006.

I must have missed the class as Dr Tyrell states and I never really did get Foucault or Derrida because for the life of me I don’t get what he is telling me. I guess I just must be slow. No matter, I will restate my impression of the coin manual’s paradoxes when I was in combat in Iraq and based on reflection upon my return: my impression was that the paradoxes removed the essence of war which is fighting. You might disagree with what I have to say but I think the logic is pretty clear.

Reference Dr Metz’s implication that I am stuck in the old “cold war mindset” I suggest that he along with so many other experts are the ones stuck in a box. He like so many others are a part of the great narrative that has been constructed on US involvement in iraq. It goes something like the army didn’t’ take coin seriously before the war and because of that the army has screwed up iraq. But happily with the help of experts and some enlightened thinkers within the active army we have now finally figured out how to do it; aka the surge. I argue that this entire construct is flawed. That by and large the American army has done pretty well in Iraq—even prior to the surge--with the strategic and political cards it was dealt. My article in fact threatens the intellectual base of the new coin doctrine because it calls its basic theoretical premises into question. Counterinsurgency war is not “armed social science” as Kilkullen has called it. Instead at its basic level is violence and death; this was my impression after a year in Baghdad.

As for Jedburg’s mean statement that I was hunkered down in a fob I point him to a recent oped piece that I had published in Army Times on that subject. He could also ask any number of 4 star generals on down to the lowest private in my squadron if I “got it” and new how to do coin. And finally, he might try asking other commanders who lost soldiers what their priorities were. I know what I said at that Heritage panel did not fit in with what the coin experts believe actual coin ops should be like, but again my impression of counterinsurgency warfare is that fighting is its basic element and so killing and not being killed were my top priorities. So go ahead Jedburg and ask people who knew of me and I trust you will not get the profile back that you have created on me.

I will pose a counterfactual again that I posted last week on this blog: If the army had read books like Nagl’s before the war and trained and taken seriously coin operations would things be any different in iraq than they are now? If the army had focused predominantly on coin prior to 2003 would the march to Baghdad gone the same way?

In my mind FM3-24 has become the army’s primary operational doctrine, and to its detriment. It has pushed us into doing things that make no sense to me: like arming the enemy of the government that we support; like dogmatically using the tactics of combat outposts in areas where other methods might be better but we do this because a French officer had success with them in the mountains of Algeria in 1958.

I think the coin doctrine has merit and can work under certain conditions; like French Algeria in the late 50s or El Salvador in the 1980s. But Civil War iraq in 2007? What we need is fresh thinking on how to operate there but the seduction of FM 3-24 in our army has pushed us into dogmatism.

One last point. A good friend of mine who was closely involved with the rebuilding of the army and its intellectual base after Vietnam told me recently that prior to its 1986 publication FM 100-5 had at least 110 articles written about it in the years leading up to its publication that fundamentally questioned its theoretical premises. How many articles written in Military Review, Parameters, etc have fundamentally questioned our new coin doctrine? Only a few.

If you want to read a quality piece written by another combat battalion commander read LTC Ross Brown’s recent article in Military Review on his experience in Iraq in 2005. Or ask some of our infantry leaders currently serving in Anbar if they are using FM 3-24 as their operational guide or the older FM 90-8 on counter guerilla operations.

To repeat, war is not “armed social science,” though many of you may want it to be.