America's Dirty Wars

In late 2006, while the counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were still raging, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps jointly published the seminal Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The book’s release was much publicized, and it was reportedly downloaded from the Internet more than one million times in the months following publication as friends and enemies across the world were eager to gain insight into how the United States understood irregular warfare – and how these understandings might be applied to the counterinsurgency fight in Iraq in particular.

Notably, most of the new “COIN” (military shorthand for counterinsurgency) doctrine was deeply grounded in the experiences of the Cold War and earlier, especially the seminal influence of counterinsurgency philosopher David Galula. Echoing this, the Manual invoked the “counterintuitive” insight – now so familiar as to be obvious – that conventional military approaches in an irregular war are often counterproductive. The manual also used maxims to make these “counterintuitive” points, likely in an intentional response to Mao’s Guerrilla Warfare and certainly reflecting Galula and other “classical” counterinsurgency thinkers and practitioners who made such points during the Cold War. They included such phrases as “Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot”; “Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction”; and “The more successful the counterinsurgency is, the less force is used and more risk must be accepted.”