In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

FOREWORD When an insurgency erupted in Iraq in the hot summer of 2003,the U.S.military was unprepared to counter it. Since then, the Department of Defense has painfully relearned a number of old lessons about the nature and conduct of successful counterinsurgency campaigns. In The New Counterinsurgency Era, David Ucko traces the process by which this relearning occurred, creating a worthy successor to Douglas Blaufarb’s The Counterinsurgency Era and Richard Downie’s Learning from Conflict. The historical record suggests that a future scholar may have to write yet another book chronicling a similar relearning process.Although the U.S. military has spent more of its history fighting “small wars” than conventional ones, it has generally opted not to institutionalize the lessons it has paid for with blood and treasure. America’s top military leaders from George Washington onward have demonstrated varying degrees of antipathy toward preparations for irregular warfare, generally viewing it as an uncivilized and irrelevant anomaly. Dabbling in counterinsurgency is commonly seen as a distraction from the more important business of preparing for major combat operations against comparable enemy forces. Counterinsurgency is something of an affront to the organizational culture of America’s military; as one anonymous U.S.Army officer reportedly declared of efforts to adapt the U.S. Army for success in Vietnam, “I’ll be damned if I permit the United States Army, its institutions, its doctrine, and its traditions to be destroyed just to win this lousy war.” In that light, the strides made by the U.S. military to adapt to the demands of irregular warfare during the past several years have been impressive . However, the harder task is institutionalizing these adaptations so that the painful and costly process of relearning counterinsurgency does not have to be repeated.The innovations of operational- and tactical-level commanders in Vietnam were purposefully forgotten by a traumatized military that vowed “no more Vietnams” and refocused on major combat operations, relegating irregular warfare expertise and capabilities to a marginalized Special Operations community. Although the post-Vietnam rebuilding of the Army created the all-volunteer force that triumphed in Operation Desert vii Storm, apparent military supremacy was highly deceptive. The enemy has a vote, and our foes have chosen to fight us not on our terms but on theirs. During the occupation of Iraq, they have turned to insurgency and terrorism , the classic strategies of the weak, updated and made more lethal thanks to the globalization of communications and improvements in weapons technology. The idea that the United States could avoid irregular warfare was wrong; irregular warfare found the United States, and suddenly the counterinsurgency lessons of Vietnam are again in high demand. The United States will someday have to fight a major conventional war against another state actor, but today America’s wars are against insurgents, militias, and terrorists that leech off of disaffected indigenous populations for recruits and support for their extremist ideologies. Combating these enemies effectively requires U.S. forces that are thoroughly trained for counterinsurgency and nation building. While neither popular nor convenient, this focus is not a temporary excursion from preparing for a large-scale war; it must be an enduring priority for the U.S. military. Ucko’s study reveals that behind the scenes there is still considerable resistance to prioritizing irregular warfare. The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review offered rhetorical support but failed to link strategy for the “Long War” with new development priorities. What Secretary of Defense Robert Gates calls “Next-war-itis,” coupled with a “no more Iraqs” backlash within the military, could once again wipe out the hard-learned lessons of irregular warfare that will then have to be learned again when the next enemy of the United States decides to avoid our strengths and attack our relative weaknesses. The question of how military forces adapt to strategic change is an enormously important one, both for military organizations and for the nations that depend on them for their security and safety. David Ucko has done a great service in tracking the process by which the Department of Defense has adapted to the demands of counterinsurgency in the wake of the September 11 attacks, and his work is of more than academic interest. It has the potential to shape future decisions about the direction in which the Department of Defense allocates resources that will influence the course of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader Long War that David Kilcullen has called a “global counterinsurgency campaign...

Share