lily
12-16-2006, 01:11 AM
Link (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16222877/site/newsweek/?rf=nwnewsletter)
The Book on Iraq
The Pentagon issues a guidebook on fighting a counterinsurgency.
Web Exclusive
By Dan Ephron
Newsweek
Updated: 11:01 a.m. ET Dec 15, 2006
Dec. 15, 2006 - It started at an Army base in Fort Leavenworth, Kans., a
year ago, where Conrad Crane had been invited to offer new ideas for
fighting counterinsurgencies. A historian and an expert on military
strategy, Crane found himself alone in a room waiting for discussions to
begin. With a marker and a sheet of construction paper, he began listing
what he thought were the paradoxes of the war in Iraq, how it differed from
the conventional wars U.S. soldiers had been trained to fight. "Some of the
best weapons for counterinsurgency do not shoot," he wrote, emphasizing the
need, above all, to win over the local population with aid and
reconstruction before the militants do. "The more force you use, the less
effective it is," he wrote in point two, reasoning that excessive force
allows the other side to portray you as brutal. By point nine, he was
tackling the role of the military's top brass: "Most important decisions are
not made by generals," a reference to the decentralized nature of guerrilla
warfare and the need to empower lieutenants and captains to devise their own
tactics.
A year later, Crane's recommendations, toned down and fleshed out, form the
backbone of a new counterinsurgency manual issued by the Pentagon just this
morning became official military doctrine. The 279-page guidebook,
commissioned by the Army and the Marine Corps and drafted by a team of
experts (Crane wrote some sections and edited others), might not seem like a
revolution. Many of the ideas boil down to the hearts-and-minds credo some
policymakers have articulated (without always implementing) since the war in
Afghanistan: that giving aid and comfort to the good guys can sometimes be
even more important than killing the bad guys. But for the military, where
doctrinal changes tend to occur only slightly faster than continental drift,
putting it in writing and enshrining it in policy is a big deal. “You're
talking about a conventionally minded military that never saw a need to
treat counterinsurgency as a separate study,” says Bruce Hoffman, an expert
on terrorism at Georgetown University. “So the real significance might be
merely in the fact that there’s now an official doctrine.”
The distaste for counterinsurgency can be traced, like so many other things
in the military, to the residue of Vietnam. After more than a decade of
crushing failure, the generals vowed, more or less, never to get mixed up
again in a guerrilla war. Hoffman says war colleges across the country
literally purged their libraries of books on fighting guerrilla warfare,
though the literature was vast—from T. E. Lawrence's writings on the Arab
revolt against the Ottoman Empire to Mao's direction of the revolution in
China (his famous line to guerrillas: “Move through the people like fish
move through water”). Then came 9/11. Some of the military’s brightest
officers who had amassed experience with insurgencies in both Afghanistan
and Iraq began theorizing about counterinsurgency. Lt. Col. John Nagl was
among the first officers after September 11 to deal with the issue in
writing, authoring a doctoral thesis in 2002 on counterinsurgency lessons
from Southeast Asia (it was later published as the book, "Eating Soup with a
Knife"). Army Gen. David Petraeus made the study of counterinsurgency a
priority in his post at the Army’s Combined Arms Center in Kansas.
Crane, 54, was just settling into his job as director of the military
history department at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., when he got a
call from Petraeus a year ago. The two men had been classmates at West Point
in the early 1970s. Crane went on to serve in artillery defense but spent
much of his military career teaching at West Point. Both men completed
Ph.D.s while in the Army that would touch directly or indirectly on
counterinsurgency. Crane's was on the Allied bombing campaign during World
War II, while Petraeus wrote his thesis on the lessons of Vietnam. But it
was a monograph Crane had co-written in January 2003, "Reconstructing Iraq,"
that brought him back to the Petraeus's attention. The study, completed two
months before the invasion, predicted almost to a letter the problems the
United States would face in Iraq, including the breakdown of order and the
potential for civil war. Commissioned by the Army, the paper was widely
distributed among senior officers. But it never got traction with the
civilian leadership-neither at the Pentagon nor later in the top echelons of
the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
The Book on Iraq
The Pentagon issues a guidebook on fighting a counterinsurgency.
Web Exclusive
By Dan Ephron
Newsweek
Updated: 11:01 a.m. ET Dec 15, 2006
Dec. 15, 2006 - It started at an Army base in Fort Leavenworth, Kans., a
year ago, where Conrad Crane had been invited to offer new ideas for
fighting counterinsurgencies. A historian and an expert on military
strategy, Crane found himself alone in a room waiting for discussions to
begin. With a marker and a sheet of construction paper, he began listing
what he thought were the paradoxes of the war in Iraq, how it differed from
the conventional wars U.S. soldiers had been trained to fight. "Some of the
best weapons for counterinsurgency do not shoot," he wrote, emphasizing the
need, above all, to win over the local population with aid and
reconstruction before the militants do. "The more force you use, the less
effective it is," he wrote in point two, reasoning that excessive force
allows the other side to portray you as brutal. By point nine, he was
tackling the role of the military's top brass: "Most important decisions are
not made by generals," a reference to the decentralized nature of guerrilla
warfare and the need to empower lieutenants and captains to devise their own
tactics.
A year later, Crane's recommendations, toned down and fleshed out, form the
backbone of a new counterinsurgency manual issued by the Pentagon just this
morning became official military doctrine. The 279-page guidebook,
commissioned by the Army and the Marine Corps and drafted by a team of
experts (Crane wrote some sections and edited others), might not seem like a
revolution. Many of the ideas boil down to the hearts-and-minds credo some
policymakers have articulated (without always implementing) since the war in
Afghanistan: that giving aid and comfort to the good guys can sometimes be
even more important than killing the bad guys. But for the military, where
doctrinal changes tend to occur only slightly faster than continental drift,
putting it in writing and enshrining it in policy is a big deal. “You're
talking about a conventionally minded military that never saw a need to
treat counterinsurgency as a separate study,” says Bruce Hoffman, an expert
on terrorism at Georgetown University. “So the real significance might be
merely in the fact that there’s now an official doctrine.”
The distaste for counterinsurgency can be traced, like so many other things
in the military, to the residue of Vietnam. After more than a decade of
crushing failure, the generals vowed, more or less, never to get mixed up
again in a guerrilla war. Hoffman says war colleges across the country
literally purged their libraries of books on fighting guerrilla warfare,
though the literature was vast—from T. E. Lawrence's writings on the Arab
revolt against the Ottoman Empire to Mao's direction of the revolution in
China (his famous line to guerrillas: “Move through the people like fish
move through water”). Then came 9/11. Some of the military’s brightest
officers who had amassed experience with insurgencies in both Afghanistan
and Iraq began theorizing about counterinsurgency. Lt. Col. John Nagl was
among the first officers after September 11 to deal with the issue in
writing, authoring a doctoral thesis in 2002 on counterinsurgency lessons
from Southeast Asia (it was later published as the book, "Eating Soup with a
Knife"). Army Gen. David Petraeus made the study of counterinsurgency a
priority in his post at the Army’s Combined Arms Center in Kansas.
Crane, 54, was just settling into his job as director of the military
history department at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., when he got a
call from Petraeus a year ago. The two men had been classmates at West Point
in the early 1970s. Crane went on to serve in artillery defense but spent
much of his military career teaching at West Point. Both men completed
Ph.D.s while in the Army that would touch directly or indirectly on
counterinsurgency. Crane's was on the Allied bombing campaign during World
War II, while Petraeus wrote his thesis on the lessons of Vietnam. But it
was a monograph Crane had co-written in January 2003, "Reconstructing Iraq,"
that brought him back to the Petraeus's attention. The study, completed two
months before the invasion, predicted almost to a letter the problems the
United States would face in Iraq, including the breakdown of order and the
potential for civil war. Commissioned by the Army, the paper was widely
distributed among senior officers. But it never got traction with the
civilian leadership-neither at the Pentagon nor later in the top echelons of
the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.