COIN of the Realm

The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. By The U.S. Army and the Marine Corps. University of Chicago Press, 2007, 402pp. $15.00

The invasion of Iraq began on March 19, 2003, and it took only three weeks for the U.S. military to defeat Saddam Hussein's army. But even during those heady days, there were ominous signs of things to come. "The enemy we're fighting is a bit different from the one we war-gamed against," Lieutenant General William Wallace, the army's V Corps commander, told The New York Times a week into the conflict. The first U.S. combat fatality was a marine shot at point-blank range by men driving a civilian pickup truck. The first suicide car bombing of a U.S. checkpoint occurred ten days into the war.

Soon after Saddam's regime fell, the occupation began to falter, and a virulent Sunni insurgency took hold. The U.S. military was caught flatfooted. The army and the Marine Corps had not substantially updated their counterinsurgency doctrine since the 1980s, choosing, in the wake of the Vietnam War, to "forget" counterinsurgency and focus instead on preparing for World War III. The blitzkrieg victory in the 1991 Gulf War reinforced this conventional bias, and deployments in Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans in the 1990s were denigrated as "military operations other than war."

An interim army counterinsurgency manual was released in October 2004, a year and a half after the start of the war, but it was an intellectually sterile document. Work on a much-needed revision did not begin until a year later, when two of the military's most respected commanders, Lieutenant Generals David Petraeus and James Mattis, took charge of the process. Petraeus, now the four-star commanding general of all U.S. forces in Iraq, was then the commander of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Mattis held a parallel position at the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Virginia. The writing team they assembled included many of the best and the brightest within the army and the Marine Corps; Conrad Crane, the director of the army's Military History Institute, was charged with supervising the effort. The writing process -- which included a February 2006 conference at Fort Leavenworth where outside counterinsurgency experts, human rights groups, and military journalists were brought together to comment on a working draft -- was unprecedented in its openness. On December 15, 2006, the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual was finally released, co-signed by Petraeus and Lieutenant General James Amos, who was brought on after Mattis took command of the I Marine Expeditionary Force.

The COIN FM, as the manual is known, was so widely cited and downloaded that the University of Chicago Press recently decided to republish it as a book. The new version adds a forward by Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, a member of the manual's writing team, who provides a useful history of its evolution, and an outstanding introductory essay on the "radical" nature of the document by Sarah Sewall, the director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. The book has helped make counterinsurgency part of the zeitgeist. It has become a coffee-table staple in Washington, prompted a lengthy essay in The New York Times Book Review, and even led to an appearance by Nagl on Comedy Central's The Daily Show. In short, this is not your parents' military field manual.

HEARTS AND MINDS

Counterinsurgency refers to military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by governments or occupying forces to quell a rebellion. It is fundamentally a contest between insurgents and the government for control and the support of the population (with intervening outside powers sometimes attempting to tip the scales one way or the other). The COIN FM is not an academic document, but it is deeply informed by classical counterinsurgency theory, which emerged in response to the wave of wars of "national liberation" that followed World War II. Within that tradition, there are two competing schools of thought about the appropriate way to conduct counterinsurgency warfare: "hearts and minds" and "coercion." The COIN FM sides definitively with the former.

The manual embraces a model commonly referred to as "clear, hold, and build." It directs the military to support the "host nation" government in combating insurgents by "clearing" areas and then to transition to a law enforcement model to "hold" them. This, in turn, enables the implementation of political, social, and economic programs designed to reduce the appeal of the insurgency and "build" the government's legitimacy. The COIN FM argues that most active, passive, and potential supporters of an insurgency -- whether they are ideological, ethnic, or religious in character -- can be won over through the provision of security, since "citizens seek to ally with groups that can guarantee their safety." Providing basic services and enacting policies aimed at "address[ing] the legitimate grievances insurgents use to generate popular support" also help flip support from the guerrillas to the government. The population, rather than the insurgent movement, is the "center of gravity," and the military's "primary function in COIN is protecting that populace."

To be sure, some insurgents have to be killed and captured. But as the manual contends, "killing every insurgent is normally impossible." Force must be used with incredible restraint and discrimination and in strict compliance with the laws of war, or it "risks generating popular resentment, creating martyrs that motivate new recruits, and producing cycles of revenge."