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Title: The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual
ISBN: 0226841510
Author:
Publicate Date: 2007-07-04
Publish: 2007-07-04
List Price: $15.00
Average Customer Rating: 5.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $8.83
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $10.27
Amazon Merchant Price: $10.20
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Had a shipping problem, but Amazon fixed it!
This review is more about the product return service than the book itself, though it is excellent. The book was first shipped to me damaged, but amazon had a very easy to use and straightforward return policy, and they replaced the book with no charge. Other than the wait, there was very little inconvenence. Well done Amazon.
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2: Best in Class MILITARY Manual--Need Civilian Peace SOP
ON STRIKE UNTIL AMAZON STOPS DELETING FAVORABLE VOTES FROM FANS AND COUNTING NEGATIVE VOTES FROM THOSE WHO HATE THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE BOOK BEING REVIEWED MORE THAN THEY CARE ABOUT THE REVIEW.
The publisher should load the table of contents and nominate this important book for "Inside the Book" digitization.
Since the publisher has failed to do that, for now (pending my substantive summative review) I will just list the top level table of contents.
Chapter 1. Insurgency & Counterinsurgency
Chapter 2. Unity of Effort: Integrating Civilian and Military Activities
[This is fine for a military cursory glance, but what we really need are two other volumes: a civilian counterpart to this military manual; and a strategic planning mannual that includes both resources we control and resources we can influence with unclassified multinational decision support]
Chapter 3. Intelligence in Counterinsurgency
[This chapter is deep and broad--someone tried very hard to get it right and at first glance, it appears vastly superior to the tripe that has been published before.]
Chapter 4. Designing Counterinsurgency Campaigns and Operations
[This is new thinking and demands careful reading]
Chapter 5. Executing Counterinsurgency Operations
Chapter 6. Developing Host-Nation Security Forces
[This will need development, perhaps in the strategic manual. Apart from the obvious that the professionals knew but the political lightweights refused: go in strong enough to keep the peace, do not disband the armed forces and police, pay them first, it seems to me we need to do much much more with Ambassador Bob Oakley's original thinking on Policing the New World Disorder, and invest heavily in REGIONAL stability forces and REGIONAL gendarme reserve forces.]
Chapter 7. Leadership and Ethics for Counterinsurgency
[Important, but I continue to be shocked at the way we vacuum people into confinement, and by the reality that stupid kids with camaras not-withstanding, we cannot overcome an unethical White House or Secretary of Defense in the field--this section could use discussion of what constitutes an illegal order and what each level of operations can do to refuse an illegal order.]
Chapter 8. Sustainment
[Good start but already out of date. Army is doing some extraordinary things in "eating the tail" by implementing renewable power solutions at the outposts so that ground-based heavy logistics are dramatically reduced. Very positive focus on logistics preparation of the battlefield but misses the larger issue: secret intelligence could care less about logisticians, who have a legitimate need for bridge weights, tunnel clearance, ferry times, pierside outlet specifications, cross-country trafficability, line of sight distances along the supply line, and so on. The fact is that intelligence support to both acquisition and to logistics STINKS, and this needs draconian scorched earth management.]
Appendix A. A Guide for Action
Appendix B. Social Network Analysis and Other Analytical Tools
Appendix C. Linguist Support
Appendix D. Legal Considerations
Appendic E. Airpower in Counterinsurgency
I like this book, very much. It's is a really good first step, but it is only a UNILATERAL MILITARY first step.
The U.S. Government is still not serious--in the White House or in Congress--about deep sustained interagency and coalition operations.
They have no idea how to create a Global Range of Gifts Table down to the household level, how to call in Peace from the Sea and Peace from Above, how to use decision support to influence $500 billion a year in investments by others, how to encourage call centers in China and India (each of which have 1.5 billion for a total of 3 billion of the 5 billion poor) that can both provide instant translation support to operators and free education to the poor, in their own language, "one cell call at a time."
Bottom line: General Al Gray nailed it in 1989, in his article "Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990's." Key words: "peaceful preventive measures, non-state actors, and open source intelligence." No one wanted to listen then, and most are still conceptually-challenged now.
See also:
Policing the New World Disorder: Peace Operations and Public Security
Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
Uncomfortable Wars Revisited
Modern irregular warfare: In defense policy and as a military phenomenon
Guerrilla Warfare: Irregular Warfare in the Twentieth Century (Stackpole Military History Series)
Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror: Military Culture and Irregular War (Stanford Security Studies)
Asymmetric Warfare: Threat and Response in the 21st Century
Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
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3: A good place to begin learning about counterinsurgency warfare
This US Army / Marine Corps manual reads far more like a book than a dry piece of doctrine. This recent manual draws heavily on US experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as lessons from US and British experience in the Philippines, Malaya, El Salvador and Vietnam. I have read several other COIN manuals and papers before (Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife and Resisting Rebelion) and this manual contains a good summary of these books and other papers. It would be a good place for anyone looking to study insurgencies and counterinsurgencies to begin their study.
The book begins by cover basic aspects of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. The book then goes in to integrating military and civilian agencies, the role of intelligence, designing and executing campaigns and training host nation forces.
One area that the book does not focus on is in depth case studies. Numerous examples are cited to illustrate points, but to really look at a conflict one will need to go to one of the numerous books listed in reading lists provided at the end.
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4: for soldiers or graduate students?
I've long nutured a private grievance against FM 3-24, which suddenly broke surface when I read this delicious comment by Steve Cole in The New Yorker this week: "Its reception reflected ... the appeal of counter-insurgency among sections of the country's liberal-minded intelligentsia. This was warfare for northeastern graduate students--complex, blended with politics, designed to build countries rather than destroy them, and fashioned to minimize violence. It was a doctrine with particular appeal to people who would never own a gun."
A more scholarly analysis of FM 3-24's failings, by Andrew Salamone, appears in the August edition of the online Small Wars Journal. He thinks that the historical examples in the manual are too selective, and warns: "While the current application of the new doctrine appears to be showing signs of success in Iraq, at least in terms of metrics measuring levels of violence and U.S. casualties, our enemy's well documented strategic, operational, and tactical adaptability all but guarantees that current doctrine will be out of date for the next conflict and result in the well known axiom of trying to 'fight the last war again'."
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5: Insightful and comprehensive
The Counterinsurgency Field Manual is a surprisingly well considered text on the nature of insurgency and the points where the course of an insurgency can be influenced.
Something is (or should be) rather confusing about the U.S. military. Since the inception of the Continental Army in the American Revolution, the U.S. military has been involved with counterinsurgency operations almost constantly, at home and abroad. (Put this way, Americans were waging counterinsurgency since before there was a United States; the French and Indian War...) What is confusing is 'why isn't the U.S. better at it?'
Setting this underlying question to one side, this text sets forth a framework for understanding the causes of insurgencies, and for dealing with them. The full scope of cultural, economic, social, political, and other factors are addressed in considerable detail, along with approaches to influencing these factors to address the root causes of insurgency. It is a robust, comprehensive work that can provide an adaptable conceptual structure for anyone involved in counterinsurgency or issues relating to counterinsurgency.
The big question in my mind; Why did the Army have to manage developing this process, when more than half the work required to respond to an insurgency should be done or overseen by the State Department? Why do soldiers have to arrange economic reconstruction and infrastructure development? Aren't those folks at the State Department competent to do all this stuff?
E.M. Van Court
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