The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual
University of Chicago Press, 472 pages, $15 paper
Why in the hell is the University of Chicago republishing a military field manual? After all, the Government Printing Office already printed several thousand copies. So why would an academic publishing house put out the same material and sell it commercially?
The simple answer is that the military doctrine set forth in our field manuals matters, but because it is usually only available to those in the military, it is not widely known or available outside that small audience. Doctrine is the written foundation upon which we as a nation organize, train and equip our forces to fight our wars. We are, it is rumored, currently at war, and the man who oversaw the creation of this manual is the same one now charged with running that war, Gen. David Petraeus, who is set to offer his assessment of the progress of that war next week. But because the military does not distribute doctrinal manuals to the general public, such material rarely reaches the average reader. By publishing the new Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual, the U. of C. is correcting that situation with this, probably the most important piece of doctrine written in the past 20 years.
November 1918: Gen. John Pershing made his intentions clear to his officers in the American Expeditionary Force, or AEF, fighting in Europe in World War I: This first major American combat expedition to another hemisphere must be recorded. He ordered a series of investigative panels throughout his command. The charter for each was the same: Examine how the AEF fought in the skirmishes, battles and campaigns of the war. In theory the cumulative record would guide the professional Regular Army in the future. Such material is the raw stuff from which one creates military doctrine. They finished by the end of April 1919. And then . . . nothing happened.
The problem was that the process of converting all those building blocks into a recognizable doctrinal structure originally fell to a consortium of officers, most of whom immediately began to polish their own private pet intellectual rocks. Descending into chaos, the effort was terminated. After a cooling-off period, a group of just three men was put to the task of writing the new doctrine for the Army. One of them was a particularly well-connected young lieutenant colonel named George Lynch. Another year passed, and eventually it was decided that in order for the emerging work to have a coherent voice, a single officer, Lynch, would convert the drafts into a final product.
Thus was born, more than four years after the shooting stopped, the Army Field Service Regulations of 1923. Ultimately this was the product of a single man, yet the document remained the capstone of Army doctrine until World War II. A few tens of thousands of copies were published by the Government Printing Office during that period. As an evaluation of the tactics, techniques, procedures and methods the AEF used in World War I it was, sadly, little more than self-congratulatory pablum. Riddled with an ethnocentric and near-mythological belief in the “inherent” powers of marksmanship and fortitude of the American infantryman, and mistaken beliefs about “open warfare” (which it contended American elan brought to the killing fields of Europe in 1918), the doctrine was the intellectual equivalent of a large volume of lipstick applied to a very confused pig.
In the words of the old Virginia Slims ads, “We’ve come a long way baby.”
Dec. 15, 2006: The new military manual on how to conduct counterinsurgency is released just one year from the start of the project, via the Internet. Within eight weeks it is downloaded more than 2 million times. The print copy is later distributed through official channels to all Army and Marine units. What the U. of C. has published is an exact reproduction of that manual, with the sole addition of a short introduction.
The fact that a major academic publisher would do this is not so surprising when one considers how the book was written. Unlike the ultimately solo efforts of George Lynch, this is the product of a professional consortium. Although most were current or former members of one of the combat branches of the Army or Marine Corps, as well as being combat veterans, the more interesting aspect of this group was that almost all of them had at least a master’s degree, and quite a few could add “doctor” to their military rank and title as well.
At the top of that list is the officer who saw the need for a new doctrine, then-Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, PhD.
The team that wrote the manual was put together by Conrad “Con” Crane, a military historian, college classmate of Petraeus’ and retired officer who is now at the U.S. Army War College. (Full disclosure: When I was a young captain I taught history with then-Lt. Col. Crane at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.) Crane’s charter came from the highest levels, and he received the full support of the Army and Marine Corps in terms of personnel and assets. With this support, Crane set out to do what had not been attempted in more than 20 years, in a way that had never been tried.
Crane was a thoroughly professional officer when he wore Army green. When the Army sent him to graduate school and ordered him to become a uniformed academic, he did so to the fullest measure. The result was that Crane not only believes in the academic virtue of honest and open peer review (a concept much lauded within academe, if less often actually practiced), he actually lives by this rule. There is no better evidence than what happened soon after Crane assembled his unique writing team.
Each chapter author had just two months to create a first draft. Then, in February 2006, the Army hosted a conference at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan. Petraeus ordered that the entire effort was to be funded and supported by his command. The purpose of the meeting was to examine the whole draft and, as needed, rip it to shreds. The professional Army and Marine Corps do have a strong ethos of self-criticism, but usually this is strictly in-house. Crane, with Petraeus’ support, sent out invitations for this conference to a unique list of people.
He invited military scholars, academic historians, professional soldiers and Marines — all of which was completely normal. But he also brought in human-rights activists and intellectuals, think-tank defense intellectuals, representatives from non-governmental humanitarian organizations and journalists. Together, over two days, they tore apart what had been written, and the authors went back to the drawing board. A new draft was created. Then they crucified that one. Finally, last winter, a version was produced that seemed to represent the best of all opinions.
You know you are reading a unique military combat manual when the introduction is written (in this University of Chicago edition) by the director of Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Sarah Sewall. Indeed, Sewall, a foreign-policy adviser to presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), participated in the conference that made the manual what it is today, and her pointed, 23-page introduction is among the most compelling parts of the book/manual.
She notes, for example, that the process for writing this manual was almost exactly the opposite of what it should have been. Counterinsurgency work is something the manual itself notes should start at the political level of war, and not with the military. Military doctrine for conducting counterinsurgency operations is supposed to come second to and flow from the broader strategic guidance given by the president and the other civilians who control the military. Sewall states that since that has not been forthcoming, we soldiers were forced by necessity to work from the bottom up.
The manual is also unusual in that it addresses many things one might normally consider beyond the purview of the military but that (again) necessity has forced into the pages. Who would expect, after all, an entire section dealing with “Considerations for Economic Development,” or essays on how and why professional military members must gain and develop cultural awareness and cultural knowledge of the ethnic, religious and political groups in their immediate area of operations? And then there are the paradoxes of counterinsurgency, observations about the uniquely counterintuitive nature of such operations, such as, “Sometimes the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be,” and, “Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction,” and, “The Host Nation doing something tolerably is normally better than us doing it well.” Paradox is not something that rests easy in the military mind, and yet here it is.
The U.S.Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual is not an easy read. It takes the reader through the causes of, and potential solutions to, counterinsurgency in a no-nonsense, straightforward manner. It lays out hard numbers (for example, one needs 20 counterinsurgents for every 1,000 local residents) that the reader can use to evaluate the efforts now occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan. It lays the foundation for understanding why the American military is operating the way it is in those countries. There is no soothing narrative arc. In this book one learns exactly how to defeat an insurgency, or at least how the military thinks it is possible for other countries (with American assistance) to do so. There are no characters one can follow through the text. It is the equivalent of reading the technical manual for a passenger jet, albeit one written in plain English. It is also, probably, the single most important document one can read to make sense out of what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan.
———-
Robert Bateman is an author, a historian and an Army lieutenant colonel. His most recent book is “No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident.” The opinions in this review are his own and do not reflect those of the U.S. military or government.
