ABSTRACT
Although the long-term outcome of the present conflict in Iraq may be difficult to foresee, it seems clear that initial US efforts to cope with the insurgencies in that country have followed a predictable course. American forces initially focused on overthrowing the existing regime, and accomplished this successfully. They were, however, largely unprepared for the support and stability operations, and then the counterinsurgency, that were to follow. There were several reasons for this, not least the hubris of the top civilian policy-makers, who believed that the invasion of Iraq would be a repeat of the liberation of France in 1944, with a rapid and unproblematic transition to democracy. In this article, I focus on one thread in a complicated story: the role of US military doctrine in explaining the approach to counterinsurgency adopted in Iraq. After 9/11, the American military found itself engaged in not one, but two, major
counterinsurgencies as well as in a number of smaller operations around the globe. To make matters worse, several analysts had come to the conclusion that the global war on terror would be a protracted war, lasting decades, and would entail what military strategists increasingly came to call “global counterinsurgency” (Morris 2005; Hammes 2004). This definition of the strategic environment foresaw counterinsurgency as the principal task of military land forces for decades to come. Counterinsurgency is a difficult, and poorly understood, business. The intrinsic diffi-
culties facing a counterinsurgent are compounded by a generally inadequate understanding, on the part of academic theorists and military practitioners, of the dynamics of insurgency and counterinsurgency. There is, at best, a list of “best practices” (Cohen et al. 2006; Sepp 2005). Military practitioners are, therefore, largely groping in the dark. Counterinsurgency is a time-consuming and difficult process, with no guarantee of
success. The procedures of counterinsurgency run against the grain of “standard” military practices and thinking: it is seen as something different from “war,” which is taken to be the “real” concern of military organizations. As a result, expertise in counterinsurgency is often restricted to a small handful of officers, whereas the larger institutional military is generally reluctant to embrace the methods required for successful counterinsurgency. In short, organizational identity militates against organizational learning.
