The Counter-deception Blog

CDI.ORG September 16, 2005

Willful Ignorance: How the Pentagon sent the army to Iraq without a counterinsurgency doctrine

First appeared in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists July/August 2005  

In 1964, the old Asia hand Lucian Pye astutely noted that, despite a long and well-documented history of insurgent warfare in the world, governments that have faced insurgencies--or were once insurgents themselves--tend to be quick at forgetting their roots. For militaries, this loss of memory has not been passive, but rather reflects a conscious effort to marginalize insurgency studies. "They fail to acknowledge and codify their accumulative understanding of how to cope with insurrections," Pye lamented. "Thus each outbreak of insurgency seems to call for relearning old lessons." [1]

Yet they rarely do. And nowhere is this more true than in the United States. Scholars and soldiers alike have often used the phrase "the American way of war" to describe not just a predilection, but a virtual strategic obsession, which holds that wars are fought by gathering the maximum in manpower and materiel, hurling them into the maelstrom, and counting on swift, crushing victory. While this approach may work against a conventional army, it's nothing short of disastrous when fighting insurgents engaging in unconventional guerrilla warfare. Thus far in Iraq, the U.S. effort, though not entirely devoid of successes, has been hallmarked by overwhelmed and underprepared troops effecting heavy-handed, large-scale roundups of civilians (in some cases errantly or overzealously harming them); or the destruction of large swaths of cities and towns. Meanwhile, cycles of insurgent attacks continue to effectively target current and newly recruited Iraqi police, soldiers, and politicians, as well as Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers.

U.S. ground forces are only now beginning to readjust their approach toward counterinsurgency warfare. But to many knowledgeable observers, it's looking like too little, too late--thanks largely to the Pentagon's myopic leadership. It isn't just that the Pentagon's civilian ideologues and acquiescent brass failed to entertain even the possibility of an insurgency. And it's not merely because the civilian leadership has demonstrated a profound and deadly ignorance of insurgency's historical lessons.

It's also because, despite a plethora of writing from soldier-scholars and the informal attempts at innovation by a handful of junior officers, no formal organizational strategy exists that allows the army to rapidly and effectively adapt. All counterinsurgency scholars agree the viability of any counterinsurgency endeavor, especially one undertaken by an occupying force, depends upon this capability. Yet, until recently, even the army field manual on counterinsurgency reflected the prevailing culture of selective amnesia. The manual, published in October 2004, defines insurgency as an "organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government"--a definition that, literally applied, excluded the conflict in Iraq prior to the national elections earlier this year. [2]

U.S. soldiers on the ground would probably beg to differ. 

Complete Article

posted by Dr. Frank Stech  # 3:43 PM