The Book on Bad Apples
A new Army manual shows the smart way to beat insurgents
For the first time in 20 years, the U.S. Army has written a new field manual for counterinsurgency operations. The last one was written for the Central American wars of the 1980s, when the United States backed El Salvador's government and Army in a 12-year-long and ultimately successful counterinsurgency campaign against a well-organized Soviet-backed Marxist guerrilla movement. This effort, which has been a top priority, aims to help troops stem the raging violence and shore up the shaky new government in Iraq.
Lt. Col. John Nagl, who currently serves as adviser to the Pentagon's No. 2 civilian official, Deputy Secretary Gordon England, helped write the manual. Nagl's Ph.D. dissertation at Oxford looked at the lessons of Vietnam and Malaya, where the British conducted a successful 12-year counterinsurgency. "One of the central messages of this manual," he says, "is that the less force you use, the more effective you are."
It is a paradoxical precept and one difficult to apply amid the daily car bombings and other carnage of Iraq. Yet avoiding civilian casualties is a necessity, not a luxury. Advocates of this approach argue that the government and its military can win only if they can protect the population from the violence of the armed attackers and thus gain its allegiance.
Written by a team of authors, the manual must still pass through a few more bureaucratic hoops before it is sent out to officers in military schools and those already in the field. The manual is now being circulated in the Pentagon and at key military commands for feedback that will be incorporated into the final version. Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who led the 101st Airborne Division and the mission to train Iraq's security forces until last year, has directed the current effort in his role as commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. He has been the driving force behind the manual's creation and expects to have a final version issued by September.
Napoleon's blunder. U.S. News attended a workshop in the spring, when Petraeus gathered the manual's authors and many of the country's top counterinsurgency scholars to discuss the work in progress. The Marine Corps also participated in the drafting and plans to adopt the manual as its own. The 241-page manual provides a hefty dose of both theory and practical guidance to augment what has been a slim educational basis for counterinsurgency. After Vietnam, the U.S. military turned away from studying low-intensity and guerrilla warfare. Currently, a one-week course is given to officers before they deploy to Iraq, and units go through another short course when they arrive in Iraq at the counterinsurgency academy at Taji.
The key chapter of the manual is the fourth one, "Designing Counterinsurgency Operations." It emphasizes the need to correctly diagnose a conflict's nature and to continually assess the effectiveness of the approach taken. Tellingly, it begins with a description of how Napoleon botched his 1808 invasion of Spain and exhausted his empire by underestimating Spanish resistance. Underscoring this imperative, another expert who contributed to the new manual, Tom Marks of National Defense University, cites the need to see conflicts as first and foremost political, not military, contests. "We Americans understand the fact so imperfectly," Marks says. "An insurgency, whatever the 'type' or the inspiration, is an armed political campaign for power, which must be met by an armed political counter."
"Recipe for failure." A lengthy chapter on intelligence lays out methods for assessing a conflict, including social network analysis and other tools. A chapter on "unity of effort" addresses the importance of civilian roles in reconstruction and governance. Other chapters describe how to execute counterinsurgency operations, to build or improve a country's security forces, and to enforce leadership and ethics. A section on detention and interrogation warns that "distinguishing an insurgent from a civilian is difficult and often impossible. Treating the second like the first, however, is a sure recipe for failure."
The manual is replete with specific advice. Appendix A, "A Guide for Action," says: "Only attack insurgents when they get in the way. Try not to be distracted or forced into a series of reactive moves by a desire to kill or capture them. Provoking combat usually plays into the enemy's hands by undermining the population's confidence. Instead, attack the enemy's strategy." Elsewhere, soldiers are cautioned against befriending children but advised to reach out to women through cultural intermediaries.
Nagl will have a chance to put the manual he helped write to the test. Having served one tour in Iraq, he will take command of the 1-34 Armor Battalion at Fort Riley in Kansas later this year. There his unit will organize and train the U.S. advisers who are embedded with the fledgling Iraqi security forces, on which all hope of a U.S. drawdown is pinned. Nagl sees this as a career calling. "If you believe that this kind of war is not going to go away, we have to increase our ability at the lower end of the spectrum. We are making great strides, but there is more we can do."
With Linda Robinson
This story appears in the July 24, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.