New Interagency COIN Manual
Small Wars Journal passes on word that the State Department is working on a new interagency manual entitled “Counterinsurgency for U.S. Government Policymakers: A Work in Progress.” Given that State and other non-military agencies are critical to successful counterinsurgency, it’s good to see them working this issue.
SWJ’s editors are right, though, that we’re a long way from an effective interagency process. Indeed, we’re still fighting to get Defense on board. Inside Defense, the subscription-only source for the report, features this on their front page:
ARMY OPPOSES PERMANENT ADVISER CORPS TO TRAIN FOREIGN FORCES
The Army has rejected calls by counterinsurgency expert Lt. Col. John Nagl and others to create a permanent adviser corps to help mentor indigenous security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan because the service says it is already providing those same capabilities.
Because, after all, this is just a diversion from the real military mission of warfighting.
I’m deeply curious about how this new COIN manual tracks with the one the Army came out with not so long ago, to great fanfare – to include putting the author, LTC Nagl, on the freaking Daily Show.
Yeah, you mean the Iraqi security forces we just got recommendations to completely dissolve & rebuild from scratch because they’re so useless? Or the ones in Afghanistan, which just became the largest supplier of opium in the world?
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”