Bill DePuy on COIN, circa 1986

William DuPuy was the first commanding general of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), which was established in 1973 as American involvement in Vietnam was winding down. GEN DePuy had commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam – he was one of those generals falsely caricatured as overly focused on attrition, a guy who "didn't get it" – but is more widely known as a significant influence on the transformation of Army doctrine through the 1970s and 1980s.

I've been reading here and there in his collected papers (pdf; part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), which were compiled, edited, and published (in 1994, two years after DePuy's death) by Richard Swain and others at Leavenworth's Combat Studies Institute. There are a great many really, really interesting things in here, and I'd encourage you to take a look if you're of a doctrinal bent. DePuy was a complex figure, a serious and original thinker who understood the political context of war and led the Army to shape its doctrine in line with that context. His views on Vietnam elide the childish distinction many have drawn between the attrition advocates in the Westmoreland mold and the enlightened pacification proponents of the Abrams school. I'm going to reproduce an extended excerpt from an article he wrote in 1986 (almost a decade after retiring), called "VIETNAM: What We Might Have Done and Why We Didn't Do It" (pdf; begins on pg. 11), that bears this out.

An editorial note: I've replaced DePuy's anachronistic abbreviation of counterinsurgency as CI with the modern acronym COIN for ease of reading. I've also narrowed the excerpt down a very little bit, not so as to change the meaning but rather in the hopes that you'll read all the way through.

The Kennedy Administration, shaken by the Bay of Pigs and threatened by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev with wars of National Liberation, reached for a new initiative in foreign policy. Counterinsurgency (COIN) emerged as their response. If, after all, insurgency was the problem, then counterinsurgency must be the answer.

In the broadest sense, that may be true; but, in application, counterinsurgency tends to focus on a narrower base. In the early days, it was largely a reactive concept. Guerrillas were to be defeated, subversion was to be eliminated and nations were to be built somehow along the lines of the American model—unobjectionable, certainly, even if a bit dreamy and self-centered. One of the interesting things about COIN was that there was a role for almost every governmental agency in Washington.

A sense of movement was created as these agencies were admonished to get cracking. It is easy to issue orders in Washington. By 1962, Washington was awash in committees, seminars, study groups and visiting professors. Counterinsurgency was very much in style. For two years, no briefing on progress failed to include the proud description of a U.S. Army Engineer team which built a much-needed road in Ecuador between the peasant farmers and their market. This bit of good work seemed to resonate beautifully with the self-image of America on the march, providing a practical Yankee antidote against subversion and insurgency in the Third World.

We now know that profound and subtle political issues lie at the heart of counterinsurgency. But in 1962 the program was more grossly defined as a combination of functions and activities in which we excelled—building roads, setting up medical clinics, distributing surplus farm commodities, broadcasting anticommunist arguments and training local armies in the use of U.S. weapons. The political issues were simply assigned to the State Department on a functional basis. In short, the political issues were external to our massive structure for counterinsurgency.

In retrospect, these illusions are amusing, but there was a darker side. The theory of counterinsurgency was one thing, but the reality of Vietnam was quite another. By that, I mean that there was a huge gap between the diagnosis of causes and the reality of Vietnam. This gap persisted for years. Its traces can still be seen. In accordance with counterinsurgency doctrine, the root causes of insurgency were economic and political at the grass roots (hamlet) level. The illusion, therefore, was that remedies were to be found solely in the performance of the South Vietnamese government.

So our attention and action was focused upon that new and clearly struggling government. When things went badly, which was often, we sought the causes in Saigon. By 1963, we were so unhappy with Vietnamese government performance that we supported the ouster of President Ngo Dinh Diem (and his unintended murder) by a cabal of inept generals.

The problem, of course, was much larger and more difficult even than the admitted weakness of the government of South Vietnam. The mother cell which fed the insurgency was in Hanoi. The Politburo in North Vietnam, consisting of the world's toughest and most experienced revolutionaries, had launched a massive effort to liberate South Vietnam under the guise of a homegrown insurgency. Thousands of trained political agents and military leaders had infiltrated into the south. Arms and ammunition were being delivered by coastal trawler. The Laotian trails were traversed by carrying parties.

The National Liberation Front (NLF) [aka Viet Cong] had been established under the control and direction of Hanoi. But emphasis on the North Vietnamese involvement was unwelcome. Emphasis on the military dimensions of the war ran counter to the newly conventional wisdom. The pendulum had been given a mighty push.

If you were "for" counterinsurgency, you were "against" conventional military thinking. Military operational plans were regarded at best as unnecessary and at worst reactionary, unenlightened and stupid.

"The old generals don't understand the problem," it was said. Guerrilla war is not susceptible to conventional solutions—ARVN was organized by the U.S. military for the wrong war under outmoded concepts—we should be fighting guerrillas with guerrillas, or so went the discussions in Washington.

But while these debates went on, a combination of Vietcong skill and North Vietnamese escalation of effort, coupled with the sheer weakness of the government of Vietnam and its army, led to near collapse in late 1964 and early 1965, forestalled only by the emergency deployment of U.S. forces.

U.S. forces were deployed slowly and tentatively at first, with numerous and nervous restrictions on their employment. The very first ground forces (Marines at Danang and the 173^rd Airborne Brigade at Bien Hoa) were sent to defend the airfields from which retaliation air strikes against North Vietnam were being launched. By late 1965 and throughout 1966, the inflow of U.S. troops accelerated. By this time the 1st Cavalry Division, with great valor, had fought the North Vietnamese army in the Ia Drang campaign, and the Marines had met a North Vietnamese army division south of the DMZ. It is interesting to note the missions which U.S. forces were expected to perform. At Honolulu on 1 July, 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara outlined six major operational goals:

• Eliminate 40 to 50 percent of all Vietcong/North Vietnamese army base areas in South Vietnam.
• Open 50 percent of all the main roads and railways in South Vietnam.
• Pacify the four priority areas specified in the joint U.S./South Vietnam directive AB 141 (Saigon, central Mekong Delta, Danang area, Qui Nhon area).
• Secure 60 percent of the South Vietnamese population.
• Defend the military bases, the political and population centers, and the main food-producing areas under government of Vietnam control.
• By the end of 1966, Vietcong/North Vietnamese army forces were to be attrited at a rate at least equal to their replacement capacity.

The first five were classical counterinsurgency goals. But these objectives were patently beyond reach without defeating the rapidly growing Vietcong/North Vietnamese main forces. This problem was addressed tangentially by the sixth mission.

One could say that these missions taken together amounted to placing our priorities on setting the dinner table while the kitchen was on fire. Under this strategic guidance, MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) went to the only possible course of action—defend what needed defending and go after the main forces of the enemy with aggressive search and destroy operations. But "search and destroy," starting in 1966, lost its only hope for decisive results when both the Vietcong and North Vietnamese divisional and regimental formations moved their bases into Cambodia, Laos and the North Vietnamese panhandle north of the DMZ. These were facts which Washington was loath to accept.

Mr. McNamara expected a level of attrition which would put a ceiling on the strength of combined Vietcong main force and North Vietnamese army elements; but aggressive U.S. operations were frustrated by the withdrawal of their quarry to sanctuary where he reconstituted, retrained and reentered South Vietnam only when he was ready for battle and could afford another round of losses.

By controlling those losses, he put the attrition goals beyond reach. By the time the sanctuaries were attacked in 1970, the U.S. force was in the midst of its massive withdrawal.

[...]

The great power of counterinsurgency on the minds of decision makers arose out of its obvious importance. It dealt with security and social progress at the lowest levels—levels where the people lived and worked. Under the aegis of Ambassadors Komer and Colby, the COIN effort reached high levels of effectiveness. Its baleful influence on sound military planning stemmed from the persistent misconception that COIN could do it alone. This view was just as specious and unrealistic as the opposing notion that COIN was irrelevant in the presence of a gigantic clash of national armies.

Before leaving the subject of COIN and its impact on U.S. operational planning, it is worth mentioning that the U.S. effort also foundered on the political track. The ultimate measure of effectiveness of the whole U.S. effort simply has to be an assessment of the comparative national political strength of the South Vietnamese government and the North Vietnamese regime.

This subject is so vast and complex as to deserve a whole shelf of books but, against the bottom line, we never quite induced the growth of a strong independent government of South Vietnam. It was a shaky structure girded and propped by a pervasive American presence.

An external American ignition harness extended to every level. The power generator lay outside the machine itself. When it was withdrawn, the spark plugs no longer fired. It is difficult for this democracy of ours to deal with the political dimensions of insurgency. The kinds of measures and risks that need to be taken – the arbitrary (and often undemocratic) controls which may be required – do not go down well back here at home where the value system is unique and to a large extent nonexportable.

Our Congress is in a continuous state of dither and shock over the vaguest suggestion that we are selecting, installing and supporting strong leaders; yet, when we do not, the other side does. At least, by now we should recognize that we may be reasonably competent in the economic and military fields and even have something to offer on the plane of counterterror, but in the center ring – the political heart of the matter – we are self-constrained by our own history and political processes and are, therefore, vulnerable to failure.

It's impossible not to perceive parallels to our modern counterinsurgency debate, but the most interesting thing for me is the way this reflection undercuts the Krepinevich/Sorley/Nagl narrative about the Army's refusal to recognize the situation and adapt. The Army certainly made mistakes in Vietnam, but for the most part they weren't a product of some stubborn refusal to accept that pacification was a necessary element of the war.

Ok, who's the Joint Staff's historian?

The Chairman's Strategic Direction to the Joint Force (pdf) was issued yesterday. It's a concise, well-written essay that breaks new ground and elaborates a novel sort of military policy that is expertly tailored to America's unique and unprecedented strategic circumstances. (Ok, just kidding: it's repetitive boilerplate and says precisely nothing that hasn't appeared in every other DoD publication and major media report over the last month. But if that's your thing, you should read it.)

I don't know who's doing history for GEN Dempsey, but he or she ain't doing it very well. On page 3 of the document (the first page of actual text), there's a call-out box with a quote from Basil Liddell Hart. Here's what it says:

The true national object in war, as in peace, is a more perfect peace.

Well said, Captain Sir Basil! This is one of the least nutty, most defensible things Liddell Hart ever wrote (largely because he's just paraphrasing Clausewitz). So what's the problem? Well, the Chairman's document identifies the date of the quote as 1944, which is... well, it's just way wrong. I'm not sure why this date was chosen, but it's wrong.

This most Clausewitzian of sentiments was penned by Liddell Hart in a 1927 book entitled A Greater than Napoleon: Scipio Africanus. Writing of the peace terms the Roman general offered to the Carthaginians after his victory, Liddell Hart avers that

it is not too much to say that Scipio had a clear grasp of what is just dawning on the mind of the world to-day—that the true national object in war, as in peace, is a more perfect peace. War is the result of a menace to this policy, and is undertaken in order to remove the menace, and by the subjugation of the will of the hostile state "to change this adverse will into compliance with our own policy, and the sooner and more cheaply in lives and money we can do this, the better the chance is there of a continuance of national prosperity in the widest sense. The aim of the nation in war is, therefore, to subdue the enemy's will to resist with the least possible human and economic loss to itself" (152-153).

See the quotation marks there? That's Liddell Hart quoting himself, which is something he quite liked to do in order to show the reader that he pretty much had everything covered already, anyway. That text – the second half of the text block above – first appeared in Paris: Or, the Future of War (p. 19), first published in 1925.

A similar sentiment appeared in another of Liddell Hart's 1925 publications, this one entitled "The Napoleonic Fallacy: The Moral Objective in War." He argued that the national objective in war should be

a resumption and progressive continuance of what may be termed the peace time policy, with the shortest and least costly interruption of the normal life of the country. (Cited in Richard Swain's "B.H. Liddell Hart and the Creation of a Theory of War, 1919-1933" ($), in a 1990 issue of Armed Forces and Society.) 

I draw your attention to the origins and close relations of this quote to illustrate the dangers of abstracting attractive sentiments from their narrative and conceptual contexts. Surely the well-intended staff officer who chose this particular aphorism did so to imbue the imminent conclusion of America's extended conflicts with the sort of gravity and meaning one presumably only gets from fighting for a better world.

But Liddell Hart used the phrase as part of a broader argument about the need to prosecute wars in such a way as to ensure their rapid conclusion—something he viewed as being the only humane choice. Of course, in the service of this humane ideal, he advocated the use of strategic bombing and gas attacks against the enemy's civilian population "to strike direct at the seat of the opposing will and policy." As Swain tells us, Liddell Hart

dismissed moral objections to making war on noncombatants ... by observing that civilian losses would be unlikely to exceed those of another world war in light of the speed with which the use of gas would produce war termination (Swain 40). 

Context matters, huh? "A more perfect peace" sounds great when it manifests as limited war aims and generous terms, but what about when the means of "resumption and progressive continuance of... the peace time policy" involves the willful slaughter of noncombatants?

If we look back to the roots of the "more perfect peace" sentiment – the part that deals with rational policy, anyway – we can see one of the approximately ten billion ways that Clausewitz makes more sense than his 20th century English critic. This is from Book Eight, Chapter 6B of On War:

It is, of course, well-known that the only source of war is politics—the intercourse of governments and peoples; but it is apt to be assumed that war suspends that intercourse and replaces it by a wholly different condition, ruled by no law but its own.

We maintain, on the contrary, that war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means. We deliberately use the phrase "with the addition of other means" because we also want to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues, irrespective of the means it employs. The main lines along which military events progress, and to which they are restricted, are political lines that continue throughout the war into the subsequent peace. How could it be otherwise? Do political relations between peoples and between their governments stop when diplomatic notes are no longer exchanged? Is war not just another expression of their thoughts, another form of speech or writing? Its grammar, indeed, may be its own, but not its logic.  

If that is so, then war cannot be divorced from political life; and whenever this occurs in our thinking about war, the many links that connect the two elements are destroyed and we are left with something pointless and devoid of sense (p. 605 of the 1984 Howard and Paret translation).

Liddell Hart called Clausewitz the "mahdi of mass" and blamed him for inspiring the bloody, slug-it-out tactics that sustained the attritionists' stalemate on the Western Front. But I'd ask you to read these passages again and reflect on which man seems to abstract victory from politics and to celebrate violent and chimerical "decision."

I've gone off on a bit of a tangent, as you can see, but we should all take a couple of lessons from this episode: 1) get your dates right—it's easy, and when you don't, someone is going to make you look silly; and 2) there's almost always someone out there who has read the whole book, so make sure you understand the context of your quotes before you reproduce them.

Next time you're looking for a quote, 18, just shoot me an email!

Intervention and the presumed combat multiplier of popular uprising

In 1984, an American expert on Soviet military history wrote this in a chapter called "The Making of Soviet Strategy":

The most important mistake [of the wars in the immediate post-revolutionary period] was made by the influential Tukhachevsky, who insisted in the later stages of the [Russo-Polish] war on launching an ill-conceived offensive against Warsaw. This could be relegated to the annals of Soviet military history were it not for the significant political statement Tukhachevsky sought to make with it--that "revolution" could be exported by bayonet. Arguing for an assault on Warsaw in spite of seriously overextended supply lines and insufficient reserves, he may have placed too much weight on the expectation that the working class would rise up to greet the Soviet forces.

That's in Paret, page 652. The emphasis is added.

Tukhachevsky was perhaps the most famous of the so-called "Red Commanders"; a Bolshevik and a committed revolutionary, he vied for influence in the new army with the many rehabilitated imperial officers that Trotsky found it necessary to retain for the sake of military survival. The decision to press forward against the Polish capital was a strategic miscalculation heavily informed by ideological bias; success of the operation was dependent on an unlikely popular uprising that only a revolutionary internationalist could have any faith would happen. Sound familiar?

So: any guesses as to who that Sovietologist was? Ok, I shared this on Twitter yesterday, so some of you will already know: it was Condoleezza Rice. That, ladies and gents, is what we call irony.

ISAF's fingers are crossed. That should do the trick.

Michael Cohen highlights today an interview Kimberly Dozier did with General Petraeus and as Michael says, it is incredibly eye-opening. There are a couple of points that I think warrant some further inspection.

First is the excerpt about Petraeus' staff being "hunkered down" in "fingers-crossed" mode. While this was used to specifically describe the U.S.'s plan for decreasing corruption in Afghanistan, I would suggest that seems to be the overall strategy in Afghanistan. Much like the surge plan for Iraq (which we'll get to in a bit), we seem to be using what I've referred to previously as planning on the enemy's Least Dangerous Course of Action, or LDCOA. (Enemy representing here any challenge to mission success.) When we find ourselves in these "hard but not hopeless" situations, we seem to use hope as a major line of operation. I don't think I need to expound upon the serious issues with doing that. We need to either figure some way of effectively addressing the big issues in Afghanistan or if we can't figure it out and it actually is too hard, then we need to start heading for the door. Hope is not strategy.

The second topic is the Petraeus' reference to Iraq. COMISAF is way too experienced and smart to make such an absurd correlation between Iraq and Afghanistan. Having been part of the Iraq surge, I still firmly believe that those plans were based on the LDCOA. But we were lucky - things ended up even rosier than our unencumbered hope had anticipated. While the increased troop presence was an integral part of the surge's successes, it was by no means the most important. Think The Awakening, Sadrist stand-down, and internal changes to the Government of Iraq. The surge helped support those things, but it wasn't the deciding factor. And Petraeus should know that and also know that because of that fact, saying that COIN worked in Iraq and therefore will work in Afghanistan is just plain wrong thinking.

It's also lazy thinking. Iraq, while similar to Afghanistan in some ways, is and was a very unique situation in the history of U.S. interventions. Just like the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan is unique. Inflating the similarities shows torpid analysis - Petraeus should be talking about how the two conflicts are different and why we're doing things differently in Afghanistan because of those differences. Cut and paste does not work at the strategic level. I'm sure I've mentioned this book before, but I suggest Neustadt and May's Thinking in Time to anyone who tries to use historical reference to suggest current policy. If Petraeus' staff hasn't pored through this work yet, I'm willing to buy it and send it to them. Then maybe we won't have this terribly lazy thinking and maybe stop using hope as a plan. We were lucky that Iraq was somewhat successful in spite of the fact that we did, but it doesn't seem that Afghanistan will work out the same way.

This is your Army

This morning on the Army's website, one of the lead headlines reads as follows:

WORLD WAR I VETERAN RECEIVES PURPLE HEART 101 YEARS LATER

Hm, that's curious, I thought, considering that WWI hadn't even started 101 years ago. Intrigued, I clicked on the link. Maybe it's a different World War I. Like, World War Eye, or something, not World War One.

In April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called on Americans to face the freezing, muddy trenches and deadly chemical weapons of the Great War in an effort to make the world safe for democracy. With courage and bravery, American citizens left the peaceful U.S. soil to engage an enemy thousands of miles away.

Cpl. Gus Bishop, then a 20-year-old Kentucky native, chose to fight beside his fellow countrymen. He was severely injured by gunfire during the Meuse-Argonne Campaign, Sept. 26, 1918.

Hm, guess not.

To be fair to Specialist V. Michelle Woods, the article text gets is right: in one place it's "nine decades later," and in another "more than 92 years after getting wounded." So it's just the headline writer at army.mil who thought that World War I was more than a century ago.

(I'm surprised there wasn't a bigger party.)

Seriously though, this is a cool story. Kudos to MAJ Donald Woods, who tracked down the documents and got his grandfather awarded a Purple Heart nearly a century after he sustained his wounds.

Maj. Donald Bishop, officer in charge of communications, 1st Sustainment Brigade, grandson of Cpl. Bishop, said he began searching for his grandfather's military records in an effort to find out about his military history.

"A couple years back I started digging around trying to find his records", said Donald. "I didn't get them for the purpose of getting him a Purple Heart. It was something I wanted, just to try and dig in and try to find some stuff about him."

Through the help of the Kentucky Department of Veterans Affairs, Donald said he was able to obtain Gus's records.

The records stated Gus enlisted in the Army in September of 1917, and arrived in France in May of 1918. He was attached to the 39th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division and Company E, 318th Infantry Regiment, 80th Infantry Division.

He was credited with serving in the Fort-le-Fere engagement, Battle of Saint Milhiel and the Meuse-Argonne Campaign. He left France in May of 1919, and was honorably discharged in June of 1919.

Donald, a Kentucky native, said while going through Gus's records, he realized Gus was not awarded the Purple Heart for his injury.

This tale strikes a familiar note for me: after my grandmother died three years ago, my dad came across a stack of my grandfather's mementos from his time in North Africa and Italy back during the second war. My dad's dad died when I was nine, so the time I spent flipping through his diary and trying to match up bits of colored ribbon with the proper medal helped me learn more about his wartime service than I'd ever known before. My own dad wasn't particularly fluent with the details of his father's units and campaigns, so I'd always wondered things like why (for example) a kid from the South Wales valleys served in the Irish Guards. Turns out pretty much the whole town enlisted in the same regiment, and that's the one they ended up in.

Anyway, neat story. And SPC Woods did a good job with it, even if her editor didn't!

Al-Anbar Awakening: [Much Needed] Iraqi Perspectives

We've heard a lot of perfectly legitimate crabbing over the last year or so that the so-called "dominant narrative" of the Surge has been based on an American-centric understanding of history, that there wasn't enough consideration given to the thinking and motivations of those who turned in the sahwa, or to Iraqi civilians, or to the Jaish al-Mahdi stand-down. By and large, I agree with this. The actions of Americans have probably been overstated in the (American) story of Iraq's (relative) stabilization.

That's this new report is so welcome: Al-Anbar Awakening, Volume II: Iraqi Perspectives; From Insurgency to Counterinsurgency in Iraq 2004-2009, a publication of Marine Corps University Press. The companion document is Volume I: American Perspectives. (h/t SWJ)

I haven't read it yet, so don't hold me responsible for the content. Three hundred and forty pages should help get me through my Christmas Eve flight (and if you add in the other volume, it's nearly 700)!

This will make Gian Gentile's head explode

Last Saturday's New York Times finds lessons of counterinsurgency on the fields of Agincourt. James Glanz on how some historians are challenging the legend of English supremacy in the face of massive numerical disadvantage:

The work, which has received both glowing praise and sharp criticism from other historians in the United States and Europe, is the most striking of the revisionist accounts to emerge from a new science of military history. The new accounts tend to be not only more quantitative but also more attuned to political, cultural and technological factors, and focus more on the experience of the common soldier than on grand strategies and heroic deeds.

The approach has drastically changed views on everything from Roman battles with Germanic tribes, to Napoleon’s disastrous occupation of Spain, to the Tet offensive in the Vietnam War. But the most telling gauge of the respect being given to the new historians and their penchant for tearing down established wisdom is that it has now become almost routine for American commanders to call on them for advice on strategy and tactics in Afghanistan, Iraq and other present-day conflicts.

The most influential example is the “Counterinsurgency Field Manual” adopted in 2006 by the United States Army and Marines and smack in the middle of the debate over whether to increase troop levels in Afghanistan.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as the head of the United States Central Command, drew on dozens of academic historians and
other experts to create the manual. And he named Conrad Crane, director of the United States Army Military History Institute at the Army War College, as the lead writer.

Drawing on dozens of historical conflicts, the manual’s prime conclusion is the assertion that insurgencies cannot be defeated without protecting and winning over the general population, regardless of how effective direct strikes on enemy fighters may be.

Mr. Crane said that some of his own early historical research involved a comparison
of strategic bombing campaigns with attacks on civilians by rampaging armies during the Hundred Years’ War, when England tried and ultimately failed to assert control over continental France. Agincourt was perhaps the most stirring victory the English would ever achieve on French soil during the conflict.

The Hundred Years’ War never made it into the field manual — the name itself may have served as a deterrent — but after sounding numerous cautions on the vast differences in time, technology and political aims, historians working in the area say that there are some uncanny parallels with contemporary foreign conflicts.

Out of concern for COL Gentile's health, I cut off the excerpt just before some lady compared the French forces who opposed Henry V to al-Qaeda in Iraq. No, I'm serious.

This is a really odd article. It's ostensibly about research related to Agincourt and competing claims about the relative strength of the forces in the field, but the digression about counterinsurgency and history repeating itself is just... well, weird. I'm not sure where Glanz is trying to go, or if maybe it just helps you get things published if you drop "COIN" in somewhere. Anyway, worth a read if only for the chuckle you'll get when you think about steam coming out of COL Gentile's ears* when he thinks about the clear, objective lessons of clean, decisive conventional combat being muddied by these damned revisionist, Sorley-esque dilletantes!

Technical aside: does anybody else find it strange that Glanz and his editors 1) note that GEN Petraeus now oversees the wars as CENTCOM commander, but didn't clarify that he directed the writing of the COIN manual in one of his old jobs as the commander of TRADOC's Combined Arms Center?, and 2) began a paragraph with "[d]rawing on dozens of historical conflicts..." just two sentences after writing that Petraeus "drew on dozens of academic historians and other experts" in the writing of the manual? Isn't that the sort of amateurish repetition that you'd edit out of your kid's eighth-grade history paper?

*Just kidding. Mostly. Seriously though, I'm obviously caricaturing Gentile and having a little fun at his expense, so you don't need to tell me how wrong I've got it in the comments, and how Sorley really is wrong, and so on. I get it.