Counterinsurgency

This book is a good read and a solid reference as you read other military and war themed books. This field manual presents a unique collaboration between the Army and Marine Corps in providing doctrine for dealing with counterinsurgency operations. The result of unprecedented collaboration among top U.S. military experts, scholars, and practitioners in the field, the manual espouses an approach to combat that emphasizes constant adaptation and learning, the importance of decentralized decision-making, the need to understand local politics and customs, and the key role of intelligence in winning the support of the population. The manual also emphasizes the paradoxical and often counterintuitive nature of counterinsurgency operations: sometimes the more you protect your forces, the less secure you are; sometimes the more force you use, the less effective it is; sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction.

This monograph outlines strategic considerations relative to counterinsurgency campaigns; presents an overview of the current conflict in Iraq, focusing on counterinsurgency; analyzes counterinsurgency operations in Iraq; presents conclusions about counterinsurgency, based on the U.S. experience in Iraq; describes implications from that experience for future counterinsurgency operations; and offers recommendations to improve the ability of the U.S. government to conduct counterinsurgency in the future. For example, U.S. counterinsurgency experience in Iraq has revealed the need to achieve synergy and balance among several simultaneous civilian and military efforts and the need to continually address and reassess the right indicators to determine whether current strategies are adequate.

According to the prevailing view of counterinsurgency, the key to defeating insurgents is selecting methods that will win the people’s hearts and minds. The hearts-and-minds theory permeates not only most counterinsurgency books of the twenty-first century but the U.S.