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4 INNOVATION UNDER FIRE One year into the Iraq campaign counterinsurgency gradually became more relevant to the senior echelons of the Pentagon.At this point, the DoD leadership came to see the instability in postwar Iraq as a crucial challenge to the installation of a democratic and stable regime.1 From a virtual silence on stability operations in previous years, the DoD began signing off on several efforts aimed at augmenting the military’s ability to conduct such missions . More than anything this constituted the Pentagon’s return to the thorny issue of counterinsurgency. One of the earliest manifestations of the change in direction was OSD’s request in January 2004 for the Defense Science Board (DSB) to focus its yearly Summer Study on the “transition to and from hostilities.” The terms of reference for the commissioned study acknowledged that “we have and will encounter significant challenges following conventional military successes as we seek to ensure stability, democracy, human rights and a productive economy.”2 When the report was released, in December 2004, it framed stability operations as an unavoidable and expensive “growth industry ” that the U.S. military had to face head-on and made specific recommendations for how it might develop a capability to conduct such missions.3 The report also warned of the limited role of transformation in fostering capabilities for stability operations and emphasized the implications of such missions for the U.S. military force structure.4 The urgency accorded to stability operations in the DSB report echoed that of the Strategic Planning Guidance 2006–11, released by DoD in March 2004 to provide vision and policy direction to the armed services. Envisaging greater U.S. engagement in stability operations, SPG 2006-11 ordered the armed forces to “adjust their doctrine, organizations, training, and exercise plans . . . develop a core competency in stability operations capabilities [and] either create standing units focused on stability operations or 65 develop the capability to rapidly assemble, within their respective services, modular force elements that achieve the same effect as standing units.”5 The U.S. military also took action to improve the armed forces’ immediate suitability for counterinsurgency. Although military training had emphasized urban operations long before and throughout the 1990s, there was now a renewed urgency to such exercises. In 2004, the Army constructed additional mock villages at its Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana, and recruited Arabic-speakers to play the roles of Iraqi civilians and security forces.6 Mock villages were also constructed at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, to provide counterinsurgency training in urban areas.7 The Marine Corps underwent a similar process, incorporating a greater emphasis on urban operations, cultural sensitivity, languages , and explosive ordnance disposal into its predeployment training.8 The sudden relevance of counterinsurgency also translated into the development of new doctrine and concepts. JFCOM, the organization originally mandated to oversee DoD’s transformation agenda, became the lead agency working toward a shared joint conceptual understanding of stability operations. In September 2004 it released Stability Operations Joint Operating Concept (Stability Operations JOC), a “living” document subsequently refined to reflect the operational learning occurring in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even in its initial form, however, this document revealed some of the lessons learned in Iraq: It emphasized interagency coordination, the need to balance force with restraint, and the importance of establishing and sustaining the perception of legitimacy. It also set out four different theoretical contingencies that could lead to U.S. military participation in stability operations—upon request; during and after major combat; within a failed state; and to counter a nonstate organization—but deliberately limited its scope to the second contingency, it bearing the closest resemblance to the situation in Iraq. JFCOM concluded the analysis with the forceful statement that “stability operations must be a core mission of the military services and civil agencies.”9 In October 2004, after only five months of drafting, the U.S.Army issued FMI 3-07.22, Counterinsurgency Operations, an interim field manual on counterinsurgency and the first doctrinal publication devoted exclusively to the topic since 1986. In producing FMI 3-07.22 the Army sought advice and collaboration from the Marine Corps, the British Army, and the U.S. Army Special Warfare Center. The final product was only a stopgap, meant to provide preliminary guidance while a more developed manual could be produced. Nonetheless this 180-page document was already able to offer an extensive overview of the main characteristics of counterinsurgency, of...

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