Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual Research Articles

Militarization: A Reader ed. by Roberto J. Gonzalez et al., and: Militarized Global Apartheid by Catherine Besteman

Reviewed by: Militarization: A Reader ed. by Roberto J. Gonzalez et al., and: Militarized Global Apartheid by Catherine Besteman Leah Zani Roberto J. Gonzalez, Hugh Gusterson, and Gustaaf Houtman, eds. Militarization: A Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 424 pp. Catherine Besteman. Militarized Global Apartheid. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 208 pp. I open Militarization: A Reader and find a brief editor's note explaining that the volume is the result of an initiative by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists (NCA) to oppose the militarization of anthropology.1 The editors—Roberto Gonzalez, Hugh Gusterson, and Gustaaf Houtman—are all founding members of the NCA. The table of contents includes many other NCA members, including Catherine Besteman (author of Militarized Global Apartheid), Andrew Bickford, David Price, David Vine, and Catherine Lutz. The NCA formed as an independent network of US-based anthropologists promoting an ethical, demilitarized anthropology that refuses to participate in the US Army's Human Terrain System and related projects of the war on terror.2 These scholars are building on a century-old tradition of critical anthropological engagement with the American war machine, going back to Franz Boas's (1919) indictment of American anthropologists who worked as spies during World War I. The NCA previously published The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual (2009) (a teardown of the US Army-Marine Corps's Counterinsurgency Field Manual), with an excerpt from the text appearing in the final section of the Reader. Thus, I initially thought of Militarization: A Reader as the group's unofficial next book. To my surprise, the edited collection is a very different kind of book, softer and more invitational. The introduction begins with an account of toy soldiers: a son's love of toy soldiers, his father's grief after the death of his son in war, the father who then modifies toy soldiers as a memorial to [End Page 475] his son. The volume's cover image—a GI Joe army man—can, at first, be easily mistaken for a real soldier. It's a heartrending ethnographic account of father-son relations in a militarized American society that sells war to children. The editors go on to discuss the military-industrial complex, the invention of action figures in the 1950s, as well as ongoing collaborations between the Pentagon, Paramount Pictures, and Hasbro to design new weapons systems alongside the films and toys that feature them. The gentle, empathetic introduction shies just short of an overt critique of American militarism. There is no mention of the editors' founding membership in the NCA or the organization's mandate. The editors go right up to that line and then stop. I put the book down, confused. Where are the Concerned Anthropologists? The editors bring a compelling and timely ethic of demilitarization to our discipline—one that I share. However, I would have liked the editors to explicitly disclose that ethic in the body of the work. Back in 2019, when the collection went to press, I would likely have agreed with this gentler approach. But 2020 was a crucible of a year that has made the concerns of this volume feel more urgent. Published in 2020, by comparison, Besteman's Militarized Global Apartheid is outraged and uncompromising. Amid a global pandemic, the Reader's softness now feels a bit too parental. We've grown up. The study of militarism has become more necessary and our responsibility more pressing to model ethical anthropology. We live in a world radically transformed by pervasive militarization, especially American militarization. The Reader is a much-needed cross-cultural reference for militarization in different contexts with a focus on the United States and its outsized impact on global conflict. The volume's strength is its comprehensive coverage and intersectional, multidisciplinary approach to militarization and its impacts. The edited collection is divided into 12 sections organized by theme, each section heralded by an introductory essay: Militarization and Political Economy; Military Labor; Gender and Militarism; The Emotional Life of Militarism; Rhetorics of Militarism; Militarization, Place, and Territory; Militarized Humanitarianism; Militarism and the Media; Militarizing Knowledge; Militarization and the Body; Militarism and Technology; and, lastly, Alternatives to Militarization. There are many entrances into the study of militarization, and this...

Winning Hearts and Minds in the Congo: Assessing the Limitations of the U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual

ABSTRACT The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 3-24) has received near-universal praise for stabilizing Iraq. Yet few have examined whether FM 3-24 is generalizable to other conflicts. This paper explores this question, assessing its applicability to the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s North and South Kivu provinces. Although FM 3-24 offers useful historical insights on counterinsurgency that are largely applicable to the Kivu Conflict, both the Congolese government and the UN peacekeeping mission face notable political constraints that would undermine their ability to operationalize its prescriptions.

COIN flips: American international relations and counter-insurgency

The essay examines the recent rehabilitation of counter-insurgency doctrine, especially as conducted by third party interveners. The advent of the refurbished US (United States) Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency field manual, a volume with scholarly self-presentation, is the focal point. This essay is concerned with the dubious bases of the doctrinal justifications driving recent US interventions. The Vietnam War turns out to be the crucial case for American scholars and policy-makers who have construed the history of counter-insurgency there as an unacknowledged success, which today has become the standard account in American International relations scholarship. The essay is a critical examination of this development and of its implications.

Biopolitics and Political Space

Biopolitics and Political Space

The Gendering of Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan

February 2009, a team of women Marines first set out to meet with Afghan women in Farah province to find out what their concerns and needs might be. A number of so-called female engagement teams (FETs), haphazardly drawn together from those few women Marines already in Afghanistan (and generally assigned to other jobs which they continued to carry out), started operating in Afghanistan in subsequent months. The teams were poorly trained but highly motivated and were attached to male units mainly in the southern and eastern provinces that are known to be particularly dangerous. They began conversations with Afghan women wherever possible but were rarely part of any coordinated effort. They were often confronted with problems they had no capability to address and repeatedly failed to deliver on promises made to residents, as their mission was not the primary concern of military commanders. It was not until March 2010 that forty Marine Corps women formally began to train for duty on FETs and subsequently deployed to Helmand province in April 2010. 1The effort to deploy FETs is a recent consequence of the adoption of counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine in Afghanistan.2 David Petraeus, commander of the ioist Airborne Division in Iraq in 2003-4, resurrected COIN, a traditional mainstay of colonial war fighting, as an appropriate strategy. His success with the populationcentric strategy in Mosul no doubt influenced his subsequent career, including a brief stop to supervise operations of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan 2010-11, as well as the later adoption of COIN, and not just in Iraq.3 The 2006 U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 3-24) outlines the key concepts of COIN doctrine. FM 3-24 repeatedly points out the limits of standard military strategy and seeks to mitigate the often unintended consequences of military force by proposing a broader strategy of development and reconstruction. Unlike pure counterterrorist warfare, the aim of which is to kill as many insurgents as possible, counterinsurgency aims to build confidence and win the hearts and minds of the population, whose support is crucial to the continuation of the insurgency the United States is trying to stop.As Laleh rChalili points out, This coding of counterinsurgency as the civilianised option which aims at winning the hearts and minds of civilian populations and persuading them to support the counterinsurgents has a particular gendered character.4 Where traditional warfare - and especially tactics often associated with counterterrorism efforts - is coded as hypermasculine, counterinsurgency is presented as the gentler, feminine option. Since the focus of the counterinsurgency is the transformation oi civilian allegiances and remaking of their social world, a further feminization is underway: In the binary categorization of war which forms the basis of mainstream discourses about war, civilian (feminine) is the opposite of combatant (masculine).5In this essay, we argue that looking at the gendering of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan provides insight into the assumptions, strategies, and anxieties about the U.S. involvement in this particular war. We see in the gendering of counterinsurgency, exemplified most strikingly in the deployment of FETs, an attempt to reframe the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan as a humanitarian, even progressive, mission. Gendering counterinsurgency efforts as a gentler (feminine) option helps to sell the current campaign to a war-weary authence in the United States (and allied countries). It is also a way of marking U.S. civilizational superiority - and the attention lavished upon FETs deployed in Afghanistan is a significant aspect of this gendered narrative.6 Besides exploring how the operational objectives of the deployment of FETs are gendered, we pay particular attention to the signaling function of their deployment directed toward authences in Afghanistan as well as citizens of the United States and its allies. …

The U.S. Armed Forces' View of War

© 2011 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences BRIAN MCALLISTER LINN is Professor of History and Ralph R. Thomas Professor in Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. His publications include Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Paci1⁄2c, 1902–1940 (1997) and The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (2000), both of which received the Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award, and The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War (2007). His current project is Elvis’s Army: Transformation and the Atomic-Era Soldier, 1946–1965. Despite the continual issuance of buzzwords emphasizing service unity and harmony–such as “jointness,” “An Army of One,” or “The Few, the Proud”–the armed forces’ internal divisions have been vividly displayed during the last decade. A number of important books detail the disagreements between civilian and military leaders and the long struggle to implement the “surge” and the counterinsurgency (coin) strategy.1 The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have generated a radical transformation in military thought: that is, a paradigm shift from idealized, techno-centric, scienti1⁄2c formulas–such as “network-centric warfare” (ncw) or “effects-based operations” (ebo)–to more complex, ambiguous, and human-centered visions of war, which were encapsulated in 2007 by The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.2 This intellectual renaissance has led, according to some, to military victory in Iraq and a path to eventual success in Afghanistan. This interpretation is attractive because it implies that the U.S. armed forces are adaptive, learning organizations that will develop new concepts to replace failed ones. But it begs a number of central ques-

Recent U.S. Thinking About Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Baby Steps Towards a Dynamic View of Asymmetric Conflict

U.S. Department of the Army. The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual: U.S. Army Field Manual No. 3-24; Marine Corps Warfighting Publication N. 3-33.5. 1 Washington, DC: Author, 20...

A question of command: counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq

According to the prevailing view of counterinsurgency, the key to defeating insurgents is selecting methods that will win the people's hearts and minds. The hearts-and-minds theory permeates not only most counterinsurgency books of the twenty-first century but the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, the U.S. military's foremost text on counterinsurgency. Mark Moyar assails this conventional wisdom, asserting that the key to counterinsurgency is selecting commanders who have superior leadership abilities. Whereas the hearts-and-minds school recommends allocating much labor and treasure to economic, social, and political reforms, Moyar advocates concentrating resources on security, civil administration, and leadership development. Moyar presents a wide-ranging history of counterinsurgency, from the Civil War and Reconstruction to Afghanistan and Iraq, that draws on the historical record and interviews with hundreds of counterinsurgency veterans, including top leaders in today's armed forces. Through a series of case studies, Moyar identifies the ten critical attributes of counterinsurgency leadership and reveals why these attributes have been much more prevalent in some organizations than others. He explains how the U.S. military and America's allies in Afghanistan and Iraq should revamp their personnel systems in order to elevate more individuals with those attributes. A Question of Command will reshape the study and practice of counterinsurgency warfare. With counterinsurgency now one of the most pressing issues facing the United States, this book is a must-read for policymakers, military officers, and citizens.

Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Modern Wars – A Reply to Jones and Smith

‘It's all very well in practice, but does it work in theory?’ The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 3-24), published on 15 December 2006, has attracted an extraordinary amount...

The U.S. Army–Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (U.S. Army Field Manual No. 3‐24/Marine Corps Warfighting Publication No. 3‐33.5)

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Dirty Windows and Burning Houses: Setting the Record Straight on Irregular Warfare

After a slow start, the U.S. military has made remarkable strides in adapting to irregular warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, and is beginning to institutionalize those adaptations. Recent Department of Defense (DOD) directives and field manuals have elevated stability operations and counterinsurgency to the same level of importance as conventional military offensive and defensive operations. These changes are the outcome of deep reflection about the nature of current and likely future threats to U.S. national security and the military’s role in addressing them. They represent important steps toward transforming a sclerotic organizational culture that long encouraged a 'we don’t do windows' posture on so-called 'military operations other than war,' even as the nation’s leaders called upon the armed forces to perform those types of missions with increasing frequency. Despite the clear need for change from a Cold War military to one that can deal with the threats of the current century, numerous military officers and civilian experts have challenged the U.S. military’s development of improved theory and practice for irregular warfare.

Striking the Balance

The Way Forward in Iraq John A. Nagl and Brian M. Burton John A. Nagl is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (University of Chicago, 2005). He was also a member of the writing team that produced the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual and has recently returned from visits to Iraq and Afghanistan sponsored by U.S. forces there. Brian M. Burton is a research assistant at CNAS and a graduate student in the security studies program at Georgetown University.

Review of The New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual

Douglas A. Ollivant on The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. By the U.S. Army and Marine Corps. Forward by David H. Petraeus, James F. Amos, and John A. Nagl. Introduction by Sarah Sewall. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 472p. $15.00.

The New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual as Poltical Science and Political Praxis [Introduction

The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. By the U.S. Army and Marine Corps. Forward by David H. Petraeus, James F. Amos, and John A. Nagl. Introduction by Sarah Sewall. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 472p. $15.00.

Review of The New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual

Wendy Brown on The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. By the U.S. Army and Marine Corps. Forward by David H. Petraeus, James F. Amos, and John A. Nagl. Introduction by Sarah Sewall. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 472p. $15.00.

Review of The New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual

Stathis N. Kalyvas on The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. By the U.S. Army and Marine Corps. Forward by David H. Petraeus, James F. Amos, and John A. Nagl. Introduction by Sarah Sewall. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 472p. $15.00.

Review ofThe New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual

Stephen Biddle onThe U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.By the U.S. Army and Marine Corps. Forward by David H. Petraeus, James F. Amos, and John A. Nagl. Introduction by Sarah Sewall. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 472p. $15.00.