Johns Hopkins strategic guru and
former Condi consigliore Eliot
Cohen, who inexplicably has been neglected by Great Satan's Girlfriend,
helpfully rounded
up some recent works on counterinsurgency in the Washington Post the other
day.
Here are the highlights:
--James Arnold's "Jungle of
Snakes" is useful to learn the fundamentals, competently summarizing past
counterinsurgency campaigns in the Philippines, Algeria, Malaya and Vietnam,
but offering few striking insights. Read it if you want to learn the basics of
the American CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support)
program in Vietnam, for example, or learn who tortured whom in the Battle of
Algiers.
--Rand Corp. has recently released its
own COIN study, "Reconstruction Under Fire." ... [T]his new book
typifies much of the contemporary Rand product: brief, lots of bullets and
diagrams, thumbnail sketches of conflicts, and a conclusion pleading for
further research.
--David Ucko's "The New
Counterinsurgency Era" is a dense, scholarly and useful work on how the
American military adapted to counterinsurgency during the Iraq war, both on the
ground and in the classrooms of Fort Leavenworth, where most of the Army's
thinking gets done. The book captures the Army's self-inflicted amnesia about
counterinsurgency in the wake of Vietnam and the difficult steps needed to
relearn old lessons.
--Mark Moyar's "A Question of
Command" . . . reminds us that it takes a special kind of soldier --
reflective, patient, creative -- to lead counterinsurgency operations.
--Todd Greentree, the author of
"Crossroads of Intervention," is an active diplomat who . . . weaves
together personal knowledge and scholarly study and reminds us of forgotten
conflicts in Central America that still have much teach us about small wars. As
miserably unpopular as the Salvadoran conflict was, and as doomed as many
considered the U.S. effort there, it succeeded in defeating a communist
insurgency that once stood on the verge of success.
--The balanced and well-researched
"Vietnam Declassified" by Thomas Ahern, a former CIA operations
officer, describes the agency's role in Vietnam. But, like so much history of
that war, it barely deals with the Vietnamese; it's all about us. And herein
lies the greatest weakness of the COIN literature: It often lacks deep
knowledge of the other side.
I like what Cohen has to say here. In particular, I think Rand Corp.
especially needs to wake up. Sometimes it produces good work, but generally it
just hits the bullseye for predictable mediocrity. I suppose someone has to
give the Pentagon what it needs to hear, but what a dismal way to spend a
career...
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