By Dean Cheng

Best Defense department of corporate intelligence

This past week, a remarkably disturbing case of arms export control violations came to light, and one which comes at a terrible time for the administration. 

From the various accounts, it would appear that a subsidiary of United Technologies Corporation (UTC) was exporting software that was used in China's new Z-10 attack helicopter program. Worse, according to the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut, where the parent company is headquartered, this was not a case of technology diversion by the Chinese, but a case where the company, Pratt and Whitney Canada (PWC), deliberately engaged in violations of the Export Control Act.

The apparently deliberate nature of this violation makes it distinct from something like the Loral-Hughes problems of the late 1990s which led to the Cox Commission report on China-related security issues and the shift of satellites and aerospace technology to the Munitions List for export controls. In the Loral and Hughes cases, the really important technology wasn't even technology, it was "know-how," in the form of failure analysis in the wake of several failed Chinese space launches. The Chinese had very little understanding of how to conduct a proper failure analysis, which involves systems analysis, systems integration (almost in reverse), and a willingness to look objectively at problems, without allowing "guanxi" to divert criticism or blame. (Note that the latter aspect is not necessarily restricted to the Chinese, but they have had far more problems in this regard than we have.)

By contrast, the more recent case was not one of dual-use technologies, but clearly military ones. The Z-10 attack helicopter is patterned on the U.S. AH-64, Russian Mi-28, Eurocopter Tiger model, with a classic two-man fore-and-aft crew disposition. There is no mistaking it for a passenger helicopter. PWC  was apparently willing to violate U.S. export control laws, so as to gain access to the large Chinese civilian helicopter market. 

For the administration, which has been striving to modify and modernize the U.S. export control regime, the case may raise questions about how carefully this task much be approached. PWC's illegal exports occurred under the current system, one which has been patched and modified but not truly overhauled. Indeed, the administration's proposed changes would rationalize much of the current system, allowing clearer oversight rather than the current patchwork of sometimes contradictory lines of reporting and responsibility.

The UTC case demonstrates the continued need for export controls on advanced, sensitive technology, but it would be unfortunate if it discouraged, rather than encouraged, badly needed reforms to protect that technology better.

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on December 1, 2009.

David Wood captures the heartbreak of sending to war young men who only recently were boys:

I sometimes forget how young they are. A few years ago, I was lazing in the dust with a bunch of Marines during a break in training. Already combat veterans, they were about to deploy back to Iraq. They'd been practicing getting ambushed and killing the ambushers, and now they were chatting about computer games.

"Hey, did'ja ever get 'Gears of War'?" asked Louis Duran, 19.

"Nah, I was gonna," said his buddy, Steven Aspling, 20, "but my mom wouldn't let me."  

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on September 2, 2009.

I'll read anything by Andrew Krepinevich, the fine strategic thinker who bears a strong resemblance to Dwight Eisenhower circa 1939. Right now my subway reading is a new essay he has done with Barry Watts titled "Regaining Strategic Competence."

I was especially intrigued by the list of 10 common strategic blunders they attribute to business strategy expert Richard Rumelt: 

1. Failure to recognize or take seriously the scarcity of resources.

2. Mistaking strategic goals for strategy.

3. Failure to recognize or state the strategic problem.

4. Choosing poor or unattainable strategic goals.

5. Not defining the strategic challenge competitively.

6. Making false presumptions about one's own competence or the likely causal linkages between one's strategy and one's goals.

7. Insufficient focus on strategy due to such things as trying to satisfy too many different stakeholders or bureaucratic processes.

8. Inaccurately determining one's areas of comparative advantage relative to the opposition.

9. Failure to realize that few individuals possess the cognitive skills and mindset to be competent strategists.

10. Failure to understand the adversary.

There is a whole book of military history to be written just finding good illustrations of each of those mistakes. I think the United States was guilty of No. 2 and No. 10 in Iraq from 2003 through 2006. I'd say the British tripped on No. 3 during the American Revolution. I think Hitler committed No. 4 when he tackled Russia. No. 10 is probably the most common error.

I'd be interested in other examples that you see.

By Rebecca Frankel

Best Defense Chief Canine Correspondent

Looks like we've hit the dog days of summer over here at the Best Defense workshop. While Tom is taking a well-deserved break from blogging after a long haul of book writing, I will be more or less doing the same. Except this hiatus comes just in time as I have a long haul of book writing ahead of me this summer. Instead of our regular Friday war-dog post, I'll be offering a Friday war-dog photo-postcards if you will, like this one:

Zzarr, a 6-year old Dutch Shepherd and his K-9 handler U.S. Army Sergeant Nathan Arriaga (partly hidden by Zzarr), are shown before leaving Forward Operating Base Walton to patrol with 1st Battalion 67th Armoured Regiment, Task Force Dealers in the Arghandab district of Iraq. Both Zzarr and K-9 handler Sgt. Arriaga did their first combat duty in Iraq in 2009."

If you have a good MWD photo -- or pics of a soldier stray -- from the front you think deserve a viewing here, send 'em to wardogoftheweek(at)gmail.com.

Rebecca Frankel, on leave from her FP desk, is currently writing a book about military working dogs, to be published by Free Press.

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on April 20, 2009.

Dunno why, but I've managed to pick fights with parts of the Navy and the Army at the same time. On the ground, I recommended in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post that West Point and the other service academies be closed. Here is what I wrote:

Why We Should Get Rid of West Point

By Thomas E. Ricks
Sunday, April 19, 2009

Want to trim the federal budget and improve the military at the same time? Shut down West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy, and use some of the savings to expand ROTC scholarships.

After covering the U.S. military for nearly two decades, I've concluded that graduates of the service academies don't stand out compared to other officers. Yet producing them is more than twice as expensive as taking in graduates of civilian schools ($300,000 per West Point product vs. $130,000 for ROTC student). On top of the economic advantage, I've been told by some commanders that they prefer officers who come out of ROTC programs, because they tend to be better educated and less cynical about the military.

This is no knock on the academies' graduates. They are crackerjack smart and dedicated to national service. They remind me of the best of the Ivy League, but too often they're getting community-college educations. Although West Point's history and social science departments provided much intellectual firepower in rethinking the U.S. approach to Iraq, most of West Point's faculty lacks doctorates. Why not send young people to more rigorous institutions on full scholarships, and then, upon graduation, give them a military education at a short-term military school? Not only do ROTC graduates make fine officers -- three of the last six chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reached the military that way -- they also would be educated alongside future doctors, judges, teachers, executives, mayors and members of Congress. That would be good for both the military and the society it protects.

We should also consider closing the services' war colleges, where colonels supposedly learn strategic thinking. These institutions strike me as second-rate. If we want to open the minds of rising officers and prepare them for top command, we should send them to civilian schools where their assumptions will be challenged, and where they will interact with diplomats and executives, not to a service institution where they can reinforce their biases while getting in afternoon golf games. Just ask David Petraeus, a Princeton PhD.

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on March 4, 2009.

I wonder if the arm's-length treatment has anything to do with the possibility that the Brits may have tortured his grandfather in Kenya while holding him for two years.

With my book all done, and ready to be published Oct. 30, I've decided to take a break from the blog. This is partly because I plan on doing several overnight camping trips this summer, mainly during weekdays, and also because I just want a breather.

Between now and then, Best Defense will be in re-runs, re-posting some of the more interesting items from 2009, 2010, and 2011. For those of you who joined us only recently, it will be a chance to catch up on the past discussions. I've also asked Best Defense's chief canine correspondent if she wants to do a "best of" series of re-runs on Fridays with her War Dog of the Week column.

Also, to keep you busy til September, today I'm posting two items on reading lists.   

C U after Labor Day. Between now and then, I will surface on occasion with comments that can't wait, as well as some guest posts.

Just to make sure you don't get bored over the summer, here are some other military history reading lists for you:

Rep. Ike Skelton's overview list.

Ten of my own favorites (the list would be a bit different now -- in part because of the interesting comments on this post).

A Pentagon reading list.

A reading list from Guantanamo Bay detainees.

A pre-deployment list for platoon leaders going to Afghanistan.

My list for a friend deploying to Afghanistan:

The 101^st Airborne's list for Afghanistan.

And the 10 best post-deployment books.

Here's my list of what to read if you are a civilian going to work at the Pentagon. 

But if you really want to have a fun summer, here is a reading list on terrorism:

Here's one on COIN:

One on intelligence.

Here's D'Este's besties on WWII:

A "gun nut's" list.

A unusual Vietnam War list.

Adm. Stavridis' list of fiction (20 novels).

This guy also has some better suggestions near the end of his interview.

For real obscurity, a Tory's reading list.

To top it off, here are some roundups I did of reading lists:

One -- and two.

And yet another one.

And a study of the solder's load!

For a change, here is a list of books I never finished:

Since then, to my regret, I finished The Education of Henry Adams -- one of the most overrated books I've ever read, along with Liddell Hart's Strategy.

And a list of books about Iraq to avoid.

Finally, once you get tired of reading, here is a list of terrific war movies.

My friend John Nagl raved about the new study, by the Joint and Coalition Operational Analysis (JCOA) division of the J-7 department of the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, titled "Decade of War, Volume 1: Enduring Lessons from the Past Decade of Operations."

That surprised me, because I found the report very cautious, kind of treading warily around some real problems. Then the light bulb came on, and I realized what Nagl was seeing that I wasn't: The report was written in Pentagonese. You have to read between its lines.

As a public service, here I offer a translation into basic readable English:

"Lesson One: Understanding the Environment"

Unlike most of their lessons, they just get this one flat wrong. Missed the target entirely. They take the easy road and basically say that the military was right and the rest of the government didn't show up in Iraq. What they can't say: The military was at odds with the Bush administration over the mission there. The Bush administration's ambitions for Iraq were revolutionary, as demonstrated by Bremer's sweeping orders. The U.S. military, without asking permission, re-defined the mission as stability, which undercut the civilian objective. So the real lesson here is that senior civilian and military officials need to bring to the surface their differences and examine their strategic assumptions. If you can't agree on strategy going in, you've got a problem.

"Lesson Two: Conventional Warfare Paradigm"

They recommend a bunch of bureaucratic steps to encourage adaptability. What they should have said: You want the system to adapt? Then reward success and punish failure. People will sit up and take notice. Publicize these actions, and you soon will have an adaptive system. You know what is most conventional? An approach to leadership that discourages people from taking risks and doesn't punish them for passivity. You can't win a war if success is defined as keeping your guys as much on the FOB as possible.   

"Lesson Three: Battle for the Narrative"

Again, they call for a series of small but complex steps that tinker with the machine. It's all lipstick on a pig. What they should have said: You won't be successful in media and information operations as long as the consequences for U.S. military officers of "allowing a bad story" to appear are worse than for not engaging the media at all. Once they are encouraged to take risks they can experiment with the enemy formulation that information operations shape kinetic operations, not the opposite.

"Lesson Four: Transitions"

They want transitions better planned and managed. But of course. What they don't say: If you don't have commanders and key staff engaged for the duration, you always will be falling behind the enemy in understanding. And adjusting. We need to get away from one-year unit rotations. Some of the possible alternatives have been discussed on this blog.

"Lesson Five: Adaptation"

See Lesson Two. Repeat as needed.

"Lesson Six: SOF-GPF Integration"

They want to establish relationships, train together, and institutionalize best practices in collaboration. What they were trying to say: "We're all on the same side. Act like it, and instead of holding pissing contests, find ways to help each other. Senior commanders should have the discipline to counsel and even remove subordinates who don't get this." A couple of removals will get the message across.

"Lesson Seven: Interagency Coordination"

They want to "operationalize" interagency work. The real problem here is that the military tends to act like "the interagency" is a one-way street. That is, it gives orders to civilians but is very wary of accepting them. The rest of the government will be more willing to show up and play nice when regimental commanders are able to take orders from State Department officials.

"Lesson Eight: Coalition Operations"

More tinkering and better training recommended. The real lesson here is that it is only a genuine coalition if non-American members have a voice. Americans tend to be hubristic in assuming that our way is the best way. We really need to re-examine our whole approach to coalition operations. The best way to begin is by studying Eisenhower's handling of the coalition in World War II. ("I didn't fire you because you called him a son of a bitch. I fired you because you called him an English son of a bitch.")

"Lesson Nine: Host-Nation Partnering"

Their basic conclusion: We need to do better. What they don't say: We need to shut up and listen to our host nation partners. Direct U.S. intervention should be the last resort. The best model often is indirect action. That is, instead of the U.S. trying to help Mexico with its drug war, the U.S. can help the Colombians help Mexico. Generally, we should do things the host nation way -- which, if we ever want to leave, is the only sustainable way.

"Lesson Ten: State Use of Surrogates and Proxies"

They say we should worry about people doing this. What they don't say: Over the last decade in Iraq, we established a whole bunch of nasty precedents about the use of force by mercenaries that could come back and bite us on the butt. Just wait until Chinese mercenary companies start operating in Africa.   

"Lesson Eleven: Super-Empowered Threats"

They say we should worry about individuals and small groups having a long reach because of the internet and other information technologies. What they don't say: Americans invented the internet and much of this other stuff. If the U.S. government isn't using these tools well, that probably is because it isn't using the right people. Bureaucracies can never react as swiftly as small groups. So it probably is time to establish an Army Reserve information operations unit in Silicon Valley. In fact, way past time. Maybe even a Joint infowar group?

"Conclusion"

"This report," they write, "describes the eleven strategic themes derived from the enduring, joint lessons of the past decade of war, as culled from the 46 studies conducted by the JCOA since its inception in 2003." Tom's conclusion: There is indeed a lot in this report if you read between the lines and decode it into English. 

This was posted the other day by "Platoon Sergeant" in the discussion of the photo of the two loaded American soldiers taking a break in Zabul Province:

There is something I say to my soldiers when we get ready to patrol: "You are carrying 70 pounds of the lightest sh*t the army has ever designed. I've been in for 11 years now and we are light years ahead of what I had when I was a private. There is still huge areas of improvement to be made in the area of load carriage, there are a lot of better options available off the shelf that big army wont buy. There are some good reasons for this, as well as some bad ones. I don't know enough about procurement to give everyone an education.

We as an army have ignored up until recently that body armor changes how a pack interfaces with your body. Go to any light infantry unit in the army and you will see the most commonly personal bought item is an aftermarket assault pack. The issued assault pack is a carry-on bag for mid-tour leave, it lacks the necessary adjustment points for good load carriage. Some go all the way with rucksacks, I personally bought a Kifaru Armor Grip bag, specifically designed to work with body armor and still carry weight on your hips instead of shoulders. It was a big investment but it paid for itself when I had to air assault 112 pounds plus body armor and basic load in it. The molle ruck is a great pack without armor, it's hot garbage once you put an IBA, IOTV or PC on. My unit just spent $800 dollars from ATS for a custom designed 60 mm mortar pack for my soldiers. I can't tell you why the army has never thought of making a pack for mortars.

The plate carrier was a great idea for Afghanistan (personally I would wear it all the time) but we bought a poorly designed piece of equipment. Instead of buying one with a cummerbund that distributes the load better, we bought one that just hangs off your shoulders. I couldn't tell you why, SOCOM has been using one with a cummerbund for years.

The army will never get away from carrying heavy stuff, ammo is heavy, rockets are heavy, mortars are heavy, we could be carrying them better but we're not. The army is not concerned about your knees or back, despite the fact that the government will be paying our disability for the rest of our lives. I've never understood that.

(HT to WOI)

From a guest post on James Fallow's blog by Eric McMillan, who is writing a novel about his tours of duty in Iraq, one spent commanding a Stryker company.

"Two years after I came home from Iraq and a year before my wife and I found out that we were expecting a child, I stood beside my father at his mother's funeral. He didn't cry. I didn't think that odd. I am, after all, my father's son. I've seen him cry only two times in my entire life: When he sent me off to war in Iraq, and when he watched me go back a second time."

Vietnam? What's that? Obama administration officials ask the estimable James Mann.

"What does that have to do with me and the world we're living in today?" inquires Susan Rice, American ambassador to the United Nations.

Remarks like that worry me. Just because you weren't alive during the Vietnam War doesn't mean you won't go down that road. I generally am a fan of the Obama administration, on both domestic and foreign policy. But the one thing that gives me the creeps is their awkward relationship with senior military officials. Mistrusting the Joint Chiefs, suspecting their motives, treating them as adversaries or outsiders, not examining differences -- that was LBJ's recipe. It didn't work. He looked upon the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a political entity to be manipulated or, failing that, sidelined. That's a recipe for disaster, especially for an administration conspicuously lacking interest in the views of former military officers or even former civilian Pentagon officials.

In our system, White House officials have the upper hand in the civilian-military relationship, so it is their responsibility to be steward of it. That's the price of "the unequal dialogue." If the relationship is persistently poor, it is the fault of the civilians, because they are in the best position to fix it. The first step is to demand candor from the generals, and to protect those who provide it. Remove those who don't.

Anytime anyone tells me that the lessons of Vietnam are irrelevant, that's when I begin looking for a hole to hide in.

By "Tyrtaios"

Best Defense department of military revisionism

In the spring of 1876, a three-pronged campaign was launched by the U.S. Army to drive the Lakota (Sioux) back to their reservation.

The first prong, under General John Gibbon, marched east from Fort Ellis (near Bozeman, Montana). The second prong, led by General Alfred Terry (that also included Lieutenant Colonel George Custer), headed west from Fort Lincoln (near Bismarck, N. Dakota), while the third prong consisted of General George Crook's force moving up north from Wyoming into Montana.

Unknown to Terry and Gibbon, on June 17, Crook encountered a camp near the Rosebud Creek in southern Montana, and a battle ensued lasting about six hours. Although Crook was not defeated by the standards of the day, having held the battlefield, it demonstrated the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne would fight long and ferociously, and must have given Crook pause, as he decided to withdraw his force to Wyoming. This broke one side of the triangle the three prongs were supposed to create.

Meanwhile, while Crook was retiring back into Wyoming, Terry was moving west up the Yellowstone River to the Little Bighorn with the 7th Cavalry, with George Custer scouting up ahead in advance after leaving Terry's sight on 22 June.

On the morning of the 25th, the 7th Cavalry was at a fork between the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn Rivers, known as the Crow's Nest, where Custer observed another large camp. It's possible there was a haze by the time Custer came to the Crow's Nest that prevented him seeing how very large the camp actually was.

Concerned the Sioux and Cheyenne might escape, and appreciating the element of surprise, Custer decided to attack and moved down into the valley of the Little Bighorn. However, prior to moving, Captain Frederick Benteen was ordered to beak-off and head to the southwest with three companies to block what was seen as a likely escape route. A few more miles from the Little Bighorn, Custer again divided his command, ordering Major Marcus Reno to take three companies along the river bottom and attack the village on its southern tip, while Custer would lead the five remaining companies and follow Reno in support.

As a side note, George Custer's two brothers, Thomas, a two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor during the Civil War, and the youngest of the three, Boston, were also with him.

Following the top of the ridge to an intermittent tributary of the Little Bighorn, Custer may have finally realized the gravity of the situation as the north end of the village came into view. We know this, and that he must have become concerned, because he sent a message back to Benteen stating, "Benteen, come on. Big village, be quick, bring packs, P.S. Bring packs."

The trooper Custer chose to deliver that message was bugler John Martini, and he would be the last, with certainty, to see George Custer and his fellow troopers alive. It is at this point that all movements by Custer and his force are speculation, as no white survivors lived to tell the tale. Unfortunately, Sioux and Cheyenne accounts of the battle were discounted at the time, exacerbated probably by the Indians' fear of retribution in coming forward with their accounts, and/or confused by language barriers, which created inaccuracies, further complicated by fading memories as time went on.

Was George Armstrong Custer imprudent in dividing his command? Most people with a passing familiarity with the events will immediately accuse Custer of poor judgment, and say yes.

However, say what you will about the man's flamboyance and previous dash toward battle, Custer was no fool in the real sense of the word, and he was a fine cavalry commander. Some historians are reviewing his importance at Gettysburg -- where he thwarted J.E.B. Stewart, who was coming around to support Pickett.

One could argue Custer's tactics on June 25, 1876 were consistent with army doctrine for that period in time, and appropriate for the situation as he at first grasped it to be. It may be that Custer's biggest mistake was trusting his subordinate commanders could, or even would support him as planned, and at some early moment while the Indian attack built momentum, he must have recognized his plan was faltering, and the luck he had been once famous for was evaporating.

"Tyrtaios" is a retired Marine with interest in events where quick decision-making might have changed outcomes.

By Adam Elkus

Best Defense COIN respondent

Colin S. Gray's recent article in Prism, when read in context with his other works, reveals much about how an inadequate grasp of strategic theory compromised the counterinsurgency debate. Tom has graciously provided me space to elaborate on why Gray's corpus is valuable for American defense policy and strategy.

COIN as Concept Failure

It is pointless to argue, Gray claims, whether or not COIN has failed or succeeded. This is because COIN is not a concept. Debaters argue for or against COIN, a position as ridiculous as arguing about whether anti-submarine warfare is inherently good or bad. As Gray observes, COIN is not an internally coherent set of ideas. It's just a descriptor for what armies do to counter insurgents. If this sounds a bit reductive, consider that the enormous losses suffered by the Allies at Cambrai in 1914 did not constitute proof tank warfare itself had failed, nor did decisive combined arms tactics in the Gulf War prove that tank warfare was successful.

The merit or demerit in COIN "cannot sensibly be posed as a general question." Insurgency has been a constant feature of strategic history, and will likely continue to be. Whether or not to intervene in another state's internal politics is a question best left to historical circumstance and it is impossible to put forth one policy solution that will hold for any and all cases. In any event, the idea that one has a choice to engage in COIN is also a matter of context. Domestic insurgencies always must be countered as a matter of basic political survival.

It is a category error to argue that COIN is inherently more political than interstate war, as this implicitly uses a war's intensity as the defining measurement of how much it is dominated by politics. All wars involve the use of force for political purpose, are shaped by context, and feature two forces seeking to impose their will on an adversary. In other works, Gray has sensibly noted that the supposed differences between irregular and conventional warfare are ultimately cosmetic. Categorizing wars according to the predominant combat style of one or more of the belligerents leads to analytical confusion. For example, the idea of "cyberwar" erroneously implies that combat action will solely be limited to computer hackers volleying computer network attacks against each other across the digital ether.

Weapons obtain meaning only through the strategic effects they enable, making it difficult to categorize a war solely through military technology. In American operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, conventional platforms, skills, and specialties were used against primitive opponents -- and tactical innovations pioneered there will likely play prominent roles in major war. The spectacle of Canadian Leonard tanks firing on Taliban guerrillas and the reverse engineering of counter-IED technology into tools for destruction of conventional air defenses should be sufficient demonstration of the arbitrary distinction between conventional and irregular challenges.

One consequence of this categorical confusion is the idea that that one side's tactics and technologies should be defeated through deliberate mirroring. Networks should defeat networks, governments and third parties must out-govern insurgents, and so on. But there is nothing essential to a given war's policy or strategy that demands a perfectly symmetrical response. This is obvious when the enemy is a global terrorist organization -- no one would argue the U.S. should carry out suicide bombings. It is less obvious when the enemy is a guerrilla organization contesting control with a government and a third party force. Counterinsurgents do not have to "out-govern" insurgents simply because the enemy uses shadow governments for strategic effect. The enemy does have a vote, but that vote should not unnecessarily narrow counterinsurgent strategy.

COIN and Strategy

Gray's previous works have emphasized that although the logic of strategy is timeless, strategy in practice defies the American obsession with definitive principles of war. Context rules all, and principles of war are in reality only principles of warfare valid for certain temporal, political, cultural, and material circumstances. The only principles of war that truly survive are so general as to be practical nubs: war is a political act conducted for political purposes, war is a cultural undertaking, etc.

The COIN debate has essentially been a tireless search for eternal principles. But this debate, as Gray, David Kilcullen, Sebastian Gorka have all argued, rests on a tiny sliver of contemporary military history. Insurgencies differ radically according to context in strategic history, and dependence on a small set of cases (Algeria, Vietnam, Malaya) exacerbates the already Sisyphean search for principles of COIN warfare. A universally "right" way to conduct COIN does not exist, not least of which because the idea supposes a Platonic ideal that can be divorced from political and cultural circumstance. Gray argues that the sheer diversity of phenomena herded under the common moniker of "insurgency" inherently creates a plurality of strategic methods that can guide COIN tactics.

Read on