I would have thought that COIN training might also teach basic manners. The left hand is for the butt and the right hand for mouth and money. Your COINdenista is insulting the Afghan man

We took an a Soviet Division Tactical Group on an NTC map in the Aviation Captains' Career Course as late as 2007 with minimal, if any, counterinsurgency training. Having a 4-day long class on the capabilities of the Soviet BTR-70...which I never saw in Iraq, save for a few burned-out hulks...should at least be balanced with COIN. The institutional Army, from what I've seen, is getting intellectually lazy, simply recycling the same PowerPoint slides from class iteration to class iteration.

And you also make an excellent point about the CTCs--they're apparently not what they used to be. I never got a flavor of what they "used to be", but I heard that a CTC rotation was a huge deal for a unit, whereas now they're simply rehearsal exercises, and a check-the-block before a combat deployment. Maybe we do combat deployments so often that CTC rotations just seem easy, who knows?

I am NG now. I was active duty for almost 8 years though and have been to both CMTC and NTC several times. Missed my only chance to hit JRTC, but I can't say I am sorry about it.

I have also been to NTC supporting a NG BDE that was sent there enroute to Iraq in 2005. So it is not that NG BDEs don't get to go to NTC, it is just that ours wasn't. Oh well. (You kinda need the context of the rest of the conversation with the 2-star. Cliff notes version...he was convinced we were getting good training, I and my troopers were not. He had the good fortune of not having to go back into harms way, we did not. I would have rather trained them myself, but they liked to throw many roadblocks in our way. Such is life in the NG.)

My point on self-education wasn't to be self-congratulatory. Instead it is to raise the issue that, my self-education on the matter is the only education I and my unit had. Had I instead pursued a discretionary education in Arctic operations (or anything else for that matter) we all would have been woefully unprepared.

A military in a COIN conflict for nearly a decade should have modified their 'curriculum' by now. You need not take my commentary alone....look to Starbuck and other examples above.

Sir, you took my word.

I agree. I think this whole obsession with counterinsurgency is somewhat intellectually lazy. I don't know all that much about the inner-dynamics of the military, but it may be that the institutions are so stale that total obsession with these tactics becomes necessary in order to get them implemented. But considering the tactics panaceas and empowering the military to make political decisions in other contexts (i.e., other conquered nations) because of the experience in Iraq is absolutely the wrong way to go. The alternatives to invasion-->counterinsurgency are almost always the dominant strategies. And while it appears we were lucky to have someone like Petraeus reading the political tea leaves for us, we have no idea what the militia movement he engineered will become. We stumbled upon these tactics in desperation and the outcome is still undetermined. Much of the work on the ground--the counterinsurgency--was done these Iraqis themselves. I worry about the far right turning this COIN doctrine into a cynical blueprint for the emerging national hobby of invasion. They will pervert any success in Iraq to suggest that the military is capable of repeating these feats (though they occurred in an extremely specific, serendipitous environment) in the wake subsequent regime-liquidations. That would bankrupt us before the derivatives can--God knows the sanctimonious budget hawks will never touch the military.

Ok. First, the Brigade Commander has a burr in his saddle about the school he promised the sheik, so his XO is down at the Provincial Council at least two hours per day trying to pound out "budget execution" for this school project which was pounded out of the Sheik's Counsel, but for which professional Iraqis, at every level, object to because, unknown to the US, it is on the Sheik's land, and only useful for empowering him---it has no credible educational purpose (especially given the two other abandoned GRD-built schools one mile away in adjacent "battle spaces).

Of course, the BN CDRs have their own pet projects they are pushing through their sources.

The PRT, in the meantime, has several projects going. One takes loads of closely connected local tomato farmers on junkets to Amman to teach them to raise tomatoes, a young buck sergeant who knows about computers is trying to develop a provincial level enterprise wide accounting system, and several specialists are working to reopen a poultry processing facility that will employ loads of Iraqi---but the Iraqis don't seem to care since there is no adequate chicken production to run the thing.

With 23 US funded school projects approved in a province that "would not tell them where they were needed," the project plowed forward. The Dep Gov explained that if he really needed a school he could just get it built with better quality and a fraction of the cost. The Min Planning and nat'l technical folks explained how they were actively trying to freeze out the US/shiek projects from the nat'l budget since they were all unnecessary, tied to local crooks and chock full of graft and payola.

Corps Ag has a program for putting a refrigerated bongo truck in every backyard, so they are pushing, pushing to get them out the door (use it or loose it).

Meanwhile, so many of the Iraqi are frustrated with doing anything because the US guntrucks are in the middle of the road, and all these soldiers are all over every government and private sector project throwing money around.

Been there, done that. Iraq, 2008.

Wonderful to hear all these best intentions of little, incoherent strategies and micro-projects, changing priority with each rotation.

But, c'mon. This is neither effective development, good governance, or military. It is just a muddle of unfocused bits wandering aimlessly toward no credible end.

Where is the understanding needed to focus a credible and coherent post-conflict reconstruction effort, as a first step?

Having graduated last year, I can tell you the answer is in fact zero. That said, WP doesn't offer Korean, and we've been sending thousands of soldiers there for literally half a century. During Vietnam I don't believe they offered Vietnamese. I know the scenarios in Korea and Vietnam were different from Afghanistan, but you get the point.

No offense, but I think your comment speaks to exactly what COL Gentile is talking about. Of course it would be great to have platoon leaders who speak Pashto. Perhaps it would make things at the tactical level a little easier. For the next few years, anyway. But one day (probably sooner rather than later), we will leave Afghanistan, and it really won't matter that battalion and brigade commanders can speak fluently in a few tribal dialects. The fact that these Armor or FA commanders won't know how to operate together and integrate fires will, however, matter a great deal.

The point isn't neccesarily that it is bad to know COIN, just like it isn't bad to have proficiency in Dari if you're deploying to Afghanistan. What is bad, however, is that the focus on COIN has seems to have totally taken over and we can't see past it towards the future. The argument to have new PLs speaking purely local languages (at least Arabic is spoken in several different countries) is endemic of this type of thought. I think you're heart is in the right place but in the end the United States won't fall to a foreign power because we don't have guys who can't properly do a cordon and search. Instead it will be because our tank crews aren't as proficient as China's or our air defenses can't stop Russia's missiles, or whatever the case may be.

This is such a misnomer. Every potential threat we have out there is watching how these chips will fall. Why would they fight any other fight - when they know we can't handle a COIN fight? There is some good evidence that Hussein never intended to do anything other than that.

Russia and China make great bugaboos but they will take us down economically (DIME) before they try to go toe to toe with us in a military event.

COIN is going to be the coin of the realm for sometime to come. Doesn't preclude our need to regain our skills with armor and artillery. But the bad guys ain't stupid and they aren't gonna play to our strengths.

As to the other question. USMA does offer Arabic and I hope that the number of cadets (a year of foreign language is mandatory for all students) studying it over other languages has increased in the last 8 years. But you know what they say about hope.

I wouldn't read too far into my example of Chinese tanks and Russian missles. I believe threats such as these (they're only examples) are undoubtedly why we have a military and what we should be preparing our forces for (i.e. existential threats). That said, strong conventional forces (particularly air forces and navies) have many other purposes than simply blowing things up and fighting off invaders. Coincidentally, here is a story that ran today on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126197206.

The Gulf War is a great example. We used decades (at least since the 1970s) of investing in military technology and realistic training, combined it with sound diplomatic practices, and protected our national interests against a truly nonexistential threat (all of this was done in a post-Cold War world, mind you) and accomplished a series of limited objectives. There is nothing to say that rogue states, or really any states, won't have to be dealt with in such a manner again. And I don't think its unfair or unreasonable to argue that the forces of today would have a tougher time than they did in 1991.

Of course DIMEFIL is important, but strong diplomatic and "soft power" policies would largely preclude intervention in foreign nations, thereby precluding the need for an all-out focus on COIN in the first place. I also happen to agree with many of the presecriptions for the "era of persistent conflict," which are postulated by most COIN advocates. That said, one vital fact is often ignored. While overpopulation, urbanization and resource wars in the developing world certainly present problems to the US, there is nothing to say that we NEED to deploy troops in most if not all of these scenarios. Ultimately, the "era of persistent conflict" presents a host of geopolitical problems, but there is that false dilemma that the United States will have to deploy its troops to a hundred foreign lands, or else somehow face ruin.

At the end of the day, for me it boils down to this: I'm no historian or political scientist, but I can not think of an example thorughout history of a government that has been brought down (or declined rapidly) due to their inability to conduct COIN operations. States collapse for all different reasons, but not winning the hearts and minds of foreign citizens in single countries has never seemed to be one of them. Weak militaries however, has led to many a state's demise. That's an oversimplified way to put it, but I think it largely sums up why many believe the hyper-focus on COIN is misguided.

“Then there's the WWI example. The way I heard it, nobody wanted a disastrous war, but everybody had to be ready to fight it.”

Actually, Austria-Hungary did want a war but only against Serbia. Germany their ally was willing to risk war but preferred it to be aimed at Russia. The idea that the Central powers accidentally fell into war has long been discredited by modern research and scholarship particularly since East German and Russian archives have been more closely examined since the end of he Cold War.

I agree with your point about COIN being hyper emphasized at the expense of our core tasks and drills. And while it's true that a major power (Russia, China) wouldn't be able to engage us in a COIN fight without us first besting their conventional military on their turf, I do think that losing a COIN fight abroad can drastically damage a nation's psyche. One example would be the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, which cost them greatly in wealth and international prestige. One could say that the Soviet Union would not have fallen when it did with such speed if the peoples of eastern Europe hadn't seen Soviet military power bested by a few Afghans with stingers. In addition the money they poured into the conflict hurt them even more as their planned economy was already falling about their ears. Obviously, we wouldn't fall as they did from poor COIN performance in Afghanistan, but the financial burden imposed by an extended fight in conjunction with the current economic problems is cause for concern. More close to our situation might be the French in Algeria. Although their country didn't fall, the conflict did lead to a failed coup, attempts on the President's life, and general unrest the shook the country to it's soul as revelations of how the their counter insurgency was prosecuted came to the public eye. One could also point to Algeria as reason the French are so reluctant to use their military power (yes, I know that there is a general European aversion to force). Although we are a long way from the military rebelling and people filling the streets as they did in Vietnam, the American people won't let this conflict go on forever if we don't get it right. I don't want to over emphasize COIN as many do (and as a fellow old grad I know how much they do at the Academy these days; can you remember any classes ever covering Armor or Artillery operations? I can't), but if we're going to fight it we must fight it well. We won't be conquered, but it can damage us in many ways.

“A hundred years from now historians might decide that the USA wanted a war with Iran. But if such a war somehow turned into a war with Russia and China, with active theaters in Poland, Turkmenistan, Korea, Alaska, etc, I think it would be fair to call that an accident.”

No, I would not call that ‘an accident’ I would call that the incompetent management of our foreign policy. Anyone who bothers to read the history of any era realizes that the primary governing characteristic of wars is usually ‘Murphy’s Law’. The courses of most wars even by powerful states have a tendency to be unpredictable with fission like consequences usually never considered as part of the original equation. Only ignoramuses and ideological/theological fanatics believe that war is containable or the unintended is controllable.