Much material has been written about cultural factors that have challenged the Army's new focus on counterinsurgency, the most prominent of which is Air War College professor Jeffrey Record's "Cultural Barriers to Successful Counterinsurgency" monograph for the Cato Institute. Rare, however, is the "COIN culture" study with true anthropological heft. Thankfully, the gap has been filled by Robert M. Cassidy's Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror: Military Culture and Irregular War.
Cassidy provides a wide ranging analysis of how national culture, defense development, and military organizational culture affects a military's ability to wage counterinsurgency. Those unfamiliar with American military history will find his discussions of American performance in Indian and hemispheric conflicts edifying, though they (rightly) will find the American insistence on wiping clean organizational COIN knowledge after every low-grade conflict infuriating.
Col. Harry Summers and the post-Vietnam Army's collective COIN denial turns out to be just one of many successful attempts to forget the wealth of American experiential knowledge in small wars and counterinsurgency. However, unlike Max Boot's similar Savage Wars of Peace, Cassidy focuses more on the institutional forces within the Army that were responsible for such actions.
However, the greatest strength of Cassidy's book is that isn't American-centric. Although it is primarily intended for American audiences, Military Culture and Irregular War contains reams of information on Russian, British, and French counterinsurgency activity. The strongest of these foreign military studies is Cassidy's look at how Britain's own asymmetric defense strategy well-equipped it for "imperial policing" and counterinsurgency. The section on Russian counterinsurgency failures deserves a monograph of its own. If there is a category in the Darwin Awards for irregular warfare and counterinsurgency, the Russians have got it locked up.
Cassidy's discussion of present day global counter-terrrorism, however, does not substantially advance knowledge in the field. Anyone familiar with John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt's work or that of T.X. Hammes and Dr. Robert Bunker will learn little from Cassidy's own network-based analysis of Al Qaeda's campaign. That being said, Cassidy's framework synthesizes much of the netwar/4GW research and puts it within the framework of COIN. This in itself will be useful in bridging the gap between old-school COIN partisans, 4GW enthusiasts, and netwar/Global Guerrillas theorists--a "small war" in itself.
In conclusion, I recommend it for any serious student of small wars theory--and anyone interested in understanding more about today's irregular wars.
"Cassidy's framework synthesizes much of the netwar/4GW research and puts it within the framework of COIN. "
Valuable in itself, though maneuver warfare leading to occupation warfare is an element of PISRR [1], going back to Boyd, and doubtless earlier.
[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2005/07/14/jesusism-paulism-part-iii-every-man-a-panzer-every-woman-a-soldat.html
Posted by: Account Deleted | March 16, 2008 at 05:40 AM