US Army Command and General Staff College Press

US Army Combined Arms Center

Fort Leavenworth, KS

Aaron J. Kaufman, Major, US Army

Learning from Our Military History

The United States Army, Operation 

Iraqi Freedom, and the Potential for 

Operational Art and Thinking

Art of War Papers

Learning From Our Military History:

The United States Army, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the Potential 

for Operational Art and Thinking

A US Army Command and General Staff College Press Book

Published by the Army University Press

Aaron J. Kaufman, Major, US Army

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

2013

The opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the student author and do not necessarily represent the views of the US Army Command 

and General Staff College or any other governmental agency. (References 

to this study should include the foregoing statement.)
iv

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kaufman, Aaron J., author. | U.S. Army Command and General 

Staff College Press, issuing body.

Title: Learning from our military history : The United States Army, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the potential for operational art and thinking / 

by Aaron J. Kaufman.

Other titles: United States Army, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the potential for operational art and thinking

Description: Fort Leavenworth, Kansas : US Army Command and 

General Staff College Press, [2017] | Series: Art of war papers | Includes 

bibliographical references. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017012559 (print) | LCCN 2017018043 (ebook) | 

ISBN 9781940804422 () | ISBN 9781940804422 | ISBN 1940804426

Subjects: LCSH: Iraq War, 2003-2011. | United States. Army--History--Iraq War, 2003-2011. | United States--History, Military. | Adaptive 

planning (Military science) | Operational art (Military science) | Military 

planning--United States.

Classification: LCC DS79.76 (ebook) | LCC DS79.76 .K42 2017 

(print) | DDC 956.7044/3420973--dc23 | SUDOC D 110.18:M 58 

LC record available at Caution-https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012559

US Army Command and General Staff 

College Press publications cover a wide 

variety of military topics. The views expressed 

in this publication are those of the author(s) 

and not necessarily those of the Department 

of the Army or the Department of Defense. 

The seal of the US Army Command and 

General Staff College authenticates this 

document as an official publication of the US Army Command 

and General Staff College Press. It is prohibited to use this official 

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of the US Army Command and General Staff College Press.

Edited by

Michael L. Hogg
v

Abstract

This thesis began with a simple question: How was the US Army successful in OIF? As a US Army officer with two tours in OIF, I had difficulty understanding the change that occurred beginning in 2007 as a product 

of combat operations. Some tactical organizations, companies included, 

learned and adapted, whereas others accomplished little and made the environment worse. The interviews conducted as part of the Scholar’s Program and personal reflections confirmed that a deeper and more historical 

understanding is required. I concluded that OIF demonstrated the need for 

operational art and thinking, particularly in commanders of relatively junior rank. Struggling to write this thesis, I noticed my copies of the US Army’s Green Book Series on the history of World War II. Clearly, OIF lacks 

such an effort. After all the effort expended in Iraq, we may ultimately 

fail in crafting our own military history in OIF in breadth and depth. This 

thesis offers an explanation on how we learned and adapted in OIF, not for 

the purposes of a definitive military history, but only as an intellectual way 

point that may lead us to useful military history for the future of the Army.

vii

Acknowledgments

This thesis has proven one my life’s most challenging and rewarding 

endeavors. The workload of the Scholar’s Program combined with the research and writing requirements of the thesis have proven exceptionally 

challenging. I certainly wish I could have finished earlier, but life in the 

military can get away. In any case, combating against my own limitations 

has proven a constant source of struggle and perhaps an inordinate amount 

of stress. I’m thankful that it’s over.

I must first thank my wonderful wife Carolin for enduring this struggle 

with me, for giving me a good environment at home to think in and for 

that ever-present nudge to keep going. She did this even after giving birth 

to my son, William, who was not yet born when this endeavor began and 

is now over a year old.

Dr. Dan Marston has proven a fantastic mentor and professor, so I 

must thank him not only for selecting me to join the Scholars but also for 

the tireless shepherding through the minefield that is my easily distracted 

mind. Dr. Mark Hull and Dr. Nick Murray have also proven invaluable in 

their advice and support during my time in the program, particularly in the 

writing of the thesis.

To my peers—Majors Nate Springer, Dustin Mitchell, Rob Green, 

Mark Battjes, Ben Boardman, Rick Johnson, and Tom Walton—I must 

thank you all for the terrific and competitive learning environment that 

has proven a continual source of reflection and learning on my journey to 

finish this thesis.

Finally, I must thank the US Army Command and General Staff College and the Army for the opportunity to participate in this program which 

has proven the most valuable experience I’ve had beyond command. I 

hope to repay the favor in the future.

ix

Table of Contents

Abstract.................................................................................................v

Acknowledgments.............................................................................. vii

Chapter 1: Introduction.........................................................................1

Chapter 2: Doctrine, History, and Operational Art .............................11

Chapter 3: Operational Art in Counterinsurgency ..............................45

Chapter 4: Operation Iraqi Freedom: A War of Management.............73

Chapter 5: Deduction from Direct Experience: General Thoughts on 

Learning Organizations in OIF ...........................................................85

Chapter 6: The Profession of Arms, Military History, and the Potential 

for Operational Art and Thinking......................................................121

Acronyms..........................................................................................135

Bibliography .....................................................................................139

1

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

In 1992, the United States (US) Army’s Center of Military History 

(CMH) published the reader’s guide to the collection of works titled the 

United States Army in World War II. In the book’s foreword, the Chief of 

Military History, Brigadier General Harold Nelson wrote:

Since the Army authorized the project in 1946, seventy-eight 

volumes have been or are being published representing an organized treasury of knowledge on the world’s greatest conflict. 

Behind them lies one of the largest masses of records and recollections ever produced. These documents, including those 

of the enemy, have been explored by professional historians, 

with the cooperation of a host of participants and with all the 

facilities and assistance that the Office of the Chief of Military 

History and its successor, the Center of Military History, could 

provide to ensure that this endeavor was as comprehensive, accurate, and objective as possible. The final result has provided 

commanders and staff officers, historians, and students—military and civilian alike—with an unprecedented professional 

guide to past experience as they seek light on the uncertain 

path ahead.1

Later known as the Army Green Book Series, the total effort by the 

US Army in collecting, interpreting, and publishing the military history 

of the war effort remains an impressive and unsurpassed institutional effort at preserving military history for the benefit of future military officers 

and civilian historians alike. Any study of the US Army in World War II 

(WWII) will invariably involve some of the military history captured in 

the Green Book Series. The books remain an essential part of the military 

history of WWII.

The history of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) extends beyond a decade now. The Army has published several books on the early operational 

history of OIF, including On Point I and On Point II, which describe the 

first 18 months of the war. The Center of Military History has published 

Tip of the Spear, which highlights small unit actions, as well as Dale Andrade’s book Surging South of Baghdad, which presents a year-long operational and historical account of the 3d Infantry Division’s deployment in 

support of OIF in 2007. All of these accounts relied heavily on interviews, 

some more timely than others, and after-action reviews (AAR).
2

The sum total of accounts, however, provides little towards the creation of a total understanding of an operational and strategic military history that can descriptively explain how the Army and the war interacted and changed over time. Instead, researchers are left with procedural 

handbooks and writing on tactics written by various agencies in the Army, 

which fail in width, depth, and context to substitute for military history.2

Out of context practical approaches thus substitute for a deeper study of 

operational thinking and strategy. Practicality, however, is thin gruel for 

officers and commanders that require a broad and deep understanding of 

military history to act wisely in combat.3 The military history of OIF appears already defined by other narratives; ones not shaped by an Army that 

has failed, so far, to collect and interpret its own history, unlike the history 

of WWII as captured in the Green Books.4 This scattershot approach undermines the utility of military history.

This gap in Army official history has not impeded the pursuit of histories and narratives by others that stake claims on the deterministic factors 

of OIF history, on how the Army failed, succeeded, adapted, and learned 

in combat. At some point, OIF history will not remain a product of benign 

observation, but will transform into a tool to adjust the way the Army 

trains, educates, and fights in the future. Historical interpretation will 

prove consequential, whether or not the Army chooses to invest the effort 

in collecting and writing its own war history.

Many of the current accounts of the Army’s efforts in OIF rely on a 

baseline claim, at times assumed, on an historical argument roughly described as the rejection thesis. The rejection thesis has roots in the end 

of the Vietnam War, and its consequences extended into OIF. This thesis 

argues that Army deliberately rejected counterinsurgency, in theory and 

practice, following Vietnam. The moral arguments for rejection of counterinsurgency emanated from a visceral reaction to the war and the tremendous amount of resources devoted towards a losing effort. In the end, 

the Army bore the heaviest cost during the war as well as the brunt of 

the political and public opprobrium following its end. The Army barely 

escaped from the aftermath of Vietnam. Thus, equating counterinsurgency 

with Vietnam enabled the Army and its leaders to cast off COIN with the 

war itself, returning the thinking on war and warfare to its proper sphere, 

conventional land battle in Europe, where the true strategic interest lay.

5

The COIN rejection argument serves as a basis for additional narratives. Expanding from the rejection thesis, another argument assumes the 

deterministic effects of doctrine, in part based on recent Army history. The 

rejection thesis serves as the start point. In essence, the Army reformed 
3

itself and restored its professionalism and reputation, in part through 

training and education reforms, just as the Army in Iraq, burdened by its 

doctrine of decisive battles, overcame its failings through the publication 

of the new COIN field manual. The main vessel for reform in each case 

proved to be doctrine. The ultimate expression of the first reform effort 

was the 1982 version of Field Manual (FM) 100-5, nicknamed AirLand 

Battle. It served as the essential source of institutional change, as the leading indicator of what the Army would become, and was vindicated in the 

Army’s performance Operation Desert Storm.6 Thus, the Army requires 

doctrine to reform itself, to learn and adapt in a broad manner that leads 

to success. The history of the 1970s peacetime Army is overlaid atop the 

wartime Army in the mid-2000s. A decade of reforms of change from 1972 

to 1982—the historical interpretation of the period—is projected, reworded, and compressed onto OIF, specifically over the time period of 2003 to 

2006. Distilled, the argument claims that the Army required new COIN 

doctrine to improve its performance in OIF.7

Carried even further, another thesis claims that the new doctrine not 

only helped reform the Army during OIF, but also served as the basis for 

strategy that won the war. New doctrine shaped the tactical realm, or the 

conduct of the war, as well as the policy and strategy realms. It proved 

an indispensable factor, responsible for turning the war around. Soldiers, 

leaders, and policy makers alike benefitted from the efforts that went into 

the new field manual, FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency.

8

The sum of the arguments, while certainly based on fragments of historical truth, nevertheless fails to account for how the Army learned and 

adapted in combat during OIF. The rejection thesis and its offspring attempt to extract too much causation from events of the last four decades, to 

trap the Army’s way of warfare and thinking within conventional warfare 

doctrinal blinders, which began in the doctrine and training revolution of 

the 1970s. The publication of new doctrine, namely FM 3-24, stripped 

away the conventional warfare blinders and exposed the collective brain 

of the Army to modern counterinsurgency, saving the Army from itself as 

well as the strategy in Iraq.9

Examples of learning and adapting leading to improved practice are 

offered—such as Colonels Sean MacFarland in Ramadi and H.R. McMaster in Tal Afar—but such examples are used as exceptions to the general 

arguments of Army incompetence rather than prototypes of the US Army 

learning in action. Military history thus provides a few deviant examples 

for others to emulate, to intellectually sate the practitioner and to give the 

appearance of usefulness, as long as such stories fit into larger narratives. 
4

In this case, such examples are selected to provide legitimacy to larger 

arguments surrounding doctrine, strategy, and methods such as population-centric COIN that without them would appear monolithic, generic, 

overly top-down, and thus easily dismissible through a little research.10

The big, general argument would die the death of a thousand particular 

paper cuts, including arguments that attack the essential theory of population-centric COIN.11

This version of history will prove useless to the military practitioner. 

Detailed understanding of particular campaigns will remain difficult, as 

the same cases will surface again and again in footnotes and citations, providing little to no depth or context that can inform other theses or claims, 

undermining the critical role that military history serves in educating and 

developing future commanders in the profession of arms. Operation Iraqi 

Freedom, its historiography, will wane in utility as future officers and historians dismiss the big arguments in search of more particular detail in 

history, and due to a variety of reasons will find little available for primary 

research, no official history like the WWII Green Book series. The value 

of the history of OIF as a basis of how the Army learned and adapted over 

time—beyond the glut of books on tactics, techniques, and procedures—

will diminish to insignificance.12

There is a better lens with which to view and interpret the history of 

OIF, one that avoids the claims of big, top-down imposed narratives as 

offered by the rejection thesis and its offspring, and also serves to provide 

the military officer more detailed context and descriptive military history. 

The study of operational art and thinking—based on descriptive, detailed, 

and available military history—should serve as the basis for understanding how the Army learned and adapted in OIF.

This thesis begins by placing the study of military history as the centerpiece of officer education and development, particular for future commanders of forces in the field. It then examines doctrine in the US Army 

experience since the mid-1970s that began with men such as General William DePuy, and the tension it brought to officer development. The thesis 

then goes on to examine operational art in US Army doctrine and counterinsurgency (COIN), and investigate, in depth, the writing and thinking of a 

senior military officer with significant experience in countering insurgency 

as well a high command of conventionally-trained forces. In chapter four, 

we review the history of Operation Iraqi Freedom, to shape the context 

of what follows, and how the war appeared in many facets a problem of 

management. In chapter five, we seek to identify general ideas concerning 

how leaders and organizations learned and adapted while fighting in OIF, 
5

particularly concerning command leadership traits that may predispose an 

organization to learning and adapting. This chapter makes claims based on 

inductive reasoning, on the synthesis of interviews with military officers, 

and how this informs on the necessity for operational art and thinking. In 

the final chapter this thesis demonstrates the critical linkage between the 

study of military history, command leadership, and the potential for operational art and thinking. Finally, this chapter revisits the introduction and 

the critique of the rejection thesis, particular its dependence on ideas of the 

deterministic effects of doctrine.

In the end, the potential and usefulness for COIN doctrine is ultimately dependent on the quality of command leadership, on officer education and development. More importantly, OIF demonstrates the absolute requirement for operational art and thinking in command leadership, 

and better history ought to provide a basis for study, towards increasing the potential for operational art and thinking within future officers. 

However, this requirement needs much more particular and descriptive 

history than what is available now, histories rich in detail, personal experience, and context.
6

Notes

1. Richard D. Adamczyk and Morris J. MacGregor, eds., The United States 

Army in World War II (Washington, DC: The United States Army Center for 

Military History, 1992), iii.

2. The US Army places significant effort into the rapid publication of tactics, 

techniques, and procedures (TTP) and lessons learned. The main agency responsible for this is the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL), located at Fort 

Leavenworth, KS. According to its website, the CALL “rapidly collects, analyzes, 

disseminates, and archives observations, insights, and lessons learned (OIL), TTP, 

and operational records in order to facilitate rapid adaptation initiatives and conduct focused knowledge sharing and transfer that informs the Army and enables 

operationally based decision making, integration, and innovation throughout the 

Army and within the joint, interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational 

(JIIM) environment.” CALL manuals are ever-present items in most Army headquarters, more so than military history books or scholarly journals.

3. Michael Howard, “The Use and Abuse of Military History,” RUSI Journal (February 1993), 29-30. Howard argues that three general rules of study 

must be followed by the officer who studies military history as a guide in his 

profession and who wishes to avoid its pitfalls. “First, he must study in width. 

He must observe the way in which warfare has developed over a long historical period. Only by seeing what does change can one deduce what does not; 

and as much can be learned from the great discontinuities of military history as 

from the apparent similarities of the techniques employed by the great captains 

through the ages.” Secondly, officers “must study in depth. He should take a 

single campaign and explore it thoroughly, not simply from official histories but 

from memoirs, letters, diaries, even imaginative literature, until the tidy outlines 

dissolve and he catches a glimpse of the confusion and horror of the real experience. He must get behind the order subsequently imposed by the historian, and 

recreate by detailed study the omnipresence of chaos, revealing the part played 

not only by skill and planning and courage, but by sheer good luck. Only thus 

can he begin to discover, if he is lucky enough not to have experienced it at first 

hand, what war is really like.” Finally, officers “must study in context. Campaigns and battles are not like games of chess or football matches, conducted in 

total detachment from their environment according to strictly defined rules. Wars 

are not tactical exercises writ large. They are, as Marxist military analysts quite 

rightly insist, conflicts of societies, and they can be fully understood only if one 

understands the nature of the society fighting them. The roots of victory and 

defeat often have to be sought far from the battlefield, in political, social, and 

economic factors which explain why armies are constituted as they are, and why 

their leaders conduct them in the way they do.”

4. The narratives I describe all center on the US Army in OIF and emanate 

from a central idea I call the rejection narrative, focused on the idea that the 

US military, and the US Army in particular, rejected counterinsurgency after 

Vietnam. The rejection narrative serves as a basis for another causal narrative, 
7

or the doctrinal determinism narrative, which claims the US Army requires 

doctrine in order to adapt and change. The final narrative extends the deterministic effects of doctrine to the policy and strategy realms, which asserts 

that, in essence, doctrine determined strategy. The narratives are essential to 

making logical leaps of three to four decades in cause and effect, and the Army 

makes it easy to promote big idea narratives with moral overtones when the 

military history is thin or inaccessible.

5. Colin Kahl, “The Other Side of the COIN” (Paper prepared for the 

International Studies Association Annual Convention, San Francisco, CA, 26-

29 March 2009), 24; Colin Kahl, “COIN of the Realm,” Foreign Affairs 86, 

no. 6 (November/December 2007), 169; Austin Long, On Other War: Lessons

from Five Decades of Counterinsurgency Research (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 

Corporation, 2006), 20; Austin Long, “Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence: The US 

Military and Counterinsurgency Doctrine, 1960-1970 and 2003-2006,” RAND 

Counterinsurgency Study, Paper 6 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 

2008), 19. Long highlights the change of thinking on the importance on large 

scale, third-party interventionist counterinsurgency, a loss that is understandable 

considering the context of the period; Nathaniel C. Fick and John A. Nagl, “The 

US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual: Afghanistan 

Edition,” Foreign Policy, no. 170 (January/February 2009), 42-43; David Fitzgerald, “Vietnam, Iraq, and the Rebirth of Counter-Insurgency,” Irish Studies in 

International Affairs 21 (2010), 151, 158; Jeffrey Record, “Review of Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq, by Ahmed Hashim,” Middle East Policy, vol. 

13, no. 4 (Winter 2006), 156-158; Jeffrey Record, “Review of The US Army/

Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual,” Middle East Policy, vol. 14, no. 3 

(2007), 144-145.

6. Although AirLand Battle was not designed as doctrine to fight the particular enemy faced in Kuwait and Iraq.

7. Kahl, “The Other Side of the COIN,” 3, 24; Long, On Other War, 1, 

62-63; 20; Long, “Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence,” iii, 27. Long argues that 

organizational structures, such as military organizations organized to fight peer 

competitors, are both mentally and materially ill-equipped to fight insurgencies. 

Organizational culture borne of doctrine and tradition effectively set the limits 

on the ability of the military organizations to think and adapt in war. However, 

Long also challenges the claims of linkages between the publication of FM 3-24 

in December 2006 to the Army’s performance during the surge in 2007. Fick and 

Nagl, “The US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual,” 43; 

Fitzgerald, “Vietnam, Iraq, and the Rebirth of Counter-Insurgency,”151; Record, 

“Review of Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq,” 156-157; Record, “Review of The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual,” 143.

8. Fick and Nagl, “The US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency 

Field Manual,” 42-43.

9. Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 3-24, Counterinsurgency

(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2006), 1-1. The opening epigraph, 

attributed to a Special Forces officer in Iraq in 2005, claims that “counterinsurgen-
8

cy is not just thinking man’s warfare—it is the graduate level of war.” To claim 

that COIN is more challenging cognitively than other forms of war is a form of 

hubris that stakes a claim as to the inherent superiority of the doctrine that envelops the epigraph. War is cognitively challenging in all of its forms.

10. Broadly speaking, the population-centric approach to COIN emphasizes the local population as the decisive terrain, or the center of gravity, in all 

combating all insurgencies. See Department of the Army, The US Army and 

Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: The University of 

Chicago Press, 2007), xv. This public version of FM 3-24 has an intro written by John Nagl that describes the key to COIN is to protect the population. 

This is not written in the official version of the Army FM; see also Octavian 

Manea, “The Philosophy Behind the Iraq Surge: An Interview with General 

Jack Keane,” Small Wars Journal, 5 April 2011, http://smallwarsjournal.com/

blog/journal/docs-temp/726-manea.pdf (accessed 20 April 2011), 1. General 

Keane describes the principles of population-centric COIN. Keane claims that 

the weight of military effort must be placed on securing the local population 

in order to separate the insurgent from the population, in order to both defeat 

the insurgency and bolster the legitimate government; see also John A. Nagl, 

“Let’s Win the Wars We’re In,” Joint Forces Quarterly, no. 52 (1st Quarter 

2009), 23. Nagl talks about the enduring principles of COIN, invoking T.E. 

Lawrence, Sir Robert Thompson, and Robert Komer. Nagl (and Keane) argue 

that the role of coercive violence and force is subordinated to this effort, to the 

point that force and violence must be minimized in all circumstances to ensure 

that popular grievances and alienation are not extended to and directed at the 

COIN intervention force and thus risk the success of the COIN campaign. As 

insurgencies are essentially a form of war amongst the people, the blame and 

consequences of excessive violence between the insurgent and counterinsurgent will land at the feet of the COIN force, as the insurgent is often from the 

people, both in blood heritage, culture, and traditions; see also David Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 45. In his 

28 Articles, Kilcullen advocates attacking the insurgent only when he gets in 

the way of your strategy, and that the COIN force should focus on attacking 

the enemy’s strategy, not his forces. Addressing the drivers of popular grievance and insurgency causation, while at the same time protection the local 

population from the violence and retribution of the insurgent, are critical to 

defeating the subversive political organization of the insurgent and more important than capturing or killing the militant arm of the insurgency.

11. Andrew J. Birtle, US Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1942-1976 (Washington, DC: US Army Center for Military 

History, 2007), 424-429. One could also make the claim that Population-Centric 

COIN (PC-COIN) is a recycled idea from the 1960s. Birtle’s book highlights 

that the thinking behind PC-COIN within the US Army goes back to the mid1960s, and the 1966 version of the Army’s COIN manual dedicated significant 

emphasis to the critical role of nation-building and power-sharing societies. In 

essence, insurgencies are popular movements that are emergent, and in order 
9

to combat them the root problems of, among other things, social and economic 

injustice, must be addressed. Thus, PC-COIN of recent thinking retains threads 

that date back to at least the mid-1960s; for anti-PC COIN arguments, see 

Gian P. Gentile, “Our COIN Doctrine Removes the Enemy from the Essence 

of War,” Armed Forces Journal (2008), 1, http://www.armedforcesjournal.

com/2008/01/3207722 (accessed 10 April 2011). The supposed antithesis of 

population-centric COIN is enemy-centric COIN. This idea argues that population-centric approach is a strategy that essentially assumes away the enemy, 

which is a critical failure in any military planning. The enemy is relatively incidental to the larger problems that drive the insurgency. The notion of the “people 

are the key” in COIN, where an abstract center of gravity substitutes for a more 

concrete center of gravity—namely the insurgent and his organization—is a 

recipe for extending a COIN campaign interminably and the wasting of military 

resources. See Gian P. Gentile, “Freeing the Army from the Counterinsurgency 

Straitjacket,” Joint Forces Quarterly no. 58 (3d Quarter 2010), 121. In essence, 

the population-centric approach will inherently expose the COIN force to asymmetric attrition through the expenditure of limited resources over extended periods of time. See also, Gian P. Gentile, “Let’s Build an Army to Win All Wars,” 

Joint Forces Quarterly no. 52 (1st Quarter 2009), 31. Military forces in COIN 

must remain oriented on destroying the insurgent force, which is ultimately the 

most dangerous threat in any insurgency. This enemy-centric approach does not 

negate the necessity for proper strategy and the requirement for other means 

required to campaign, but argues that the military portion of any COIN force 

must remain largely oriented on destroying the armed insurgent organization; 

PC-COIN is perhaps the instrumental means of a particular and myopic view of 

COIN that centers on nation building, which is both expensive and resource-intensive, and emphasizes the political and moral worldviews of the counterinsurgent-as-interventionist power. However, interventionist COIN does not need to 

be expensive and resource-intensive, as seen by the British during the Malayan 

Emergency. For a critique of nation-building as a morally bankrupt concept, see, 

Celestino Perez, Jr., “The Army Ethic and the Indigenous Other: A Response 

to Colonel Matthew Moten’s Proposal” (Paper Submitted to the Exploring the 

Professional Military Ethic Conference, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 15-18 November 2010), 9. Perez writes, “the US government’s and the military’s approach to 

politics is naively instrumental: If we roll up our sleeves and work hard enough 

as an interagency team, we can help establish the right socio-political institutions and systems until, alas, a polity is born or revitalized. This is the Frankenstein approach to nation building. The manner by which a people becomes 

a polity has less to do with systems and infrastructure and more to do with the 

empirical mystery integral to political foundations. One can solve a puzzle; 

however, one does not solve—and much less does one build—those statistically 

uncooperative moments of political foundation. Such answers, such solutions, 

simply arise—unpredictably, unintentionally, and always in cooperation (or in 

conspiracy) with others. Oftentimes such solutions fail to arise at all, even at the 

expense of vast numbers of lives. Such is the simultaneous indispensability and 
10

elusiveness of the intangible dimension of politics.” Third parties can no more 

build a nation than they can impose political and moral perspectives on an alien 

population. Rather, they can only set the conditions that will hopefully lead to a 

political condition or solution favorable to the interests of the counterinsurgent. 

This idea of the objective of an interventionist COIN effort is concurrent with 

the definition of strategy as the pursuit of continuing advantage. See Everett C. 

Dolman, Pure Strategy: Power and Principle in the Space and Information Age

(New York: Frank Cass, 2005), 6.

12. This problem is defined also by the total lack of primary sources, of war 

diaries, journals, and other materials from individuals and units collected, saved, 

archived, and declassified.
11

CHAPTER 2

DOCTRINE, HISTORY, AND OPERATIONAL ART

It is not enough to write new doctrine, if the purpose is to change 

the way an army will fight. Ultimately, an army’s behavior in battle will almost certainly be more a reflection of its character or 

culture than of the contents of its doctrine manuals. And if that 

culture—or mindset, if you will—is formed more by experience 

than by books, then those who would attempt to modify an army’s 

behavior need to think beyond doctrine manuals.

— Paul Johnston, Doctrine is Not Enough

In the last 35 years, the US Army sought to shape itself institutionally 

as an organization centered on warfighting doctrine. Operational doctrine, 

or writing that shapes all other subordinate publications, provides the organizing framework on how the Army thinks about fighting. In the case 

of Army Field Manual 3-0, Operations, formerly 100-5, the doctrine has 

been rewritten eight times since 1976.1 Since the mid–1970s the US Army 

has attempted to use doctrine as tool for change and reform, to shift organizational momentum and thinking towards new ideas on fighting. Indeed, 

one only need read the introduction of the various iterations of Operations 

since 1976 to gain the idea of the importance the Army places on its writing:“The US Army is doctrine-based and doctrinally capable of handling 

large campaigns as well as combat in a variety of scenarios. The Army’s 

doctrine lies at the heart of its professional competence. It is the authoritative guide to how Army forces fight wars.”2

Doctrine is perhaps the most determinant and consequential representation of Army thinking, one that translates concepts on fighting to action, 

reshapes organizations, and leads the development of new combat systems. 

Most importantly, it assumes a central and deterministic role, as the Army’s 

thinking on the past, present, and future of warfare as manifested in publications that determine how the Army organizes, educates, trains, and equips 

its units, leaders, and soldiers to fight and win in the next war. It is thus the 

instrumental means of shaping change, especially organizational and institutional reform. In essence, doctrinal reform demonstrates the Army’s commitment to learning and adapting. Getting doctrine right serves as the first 

step towards future victories, an insurance against the fog and friction of the 

future battlefield. At its most simple, good writing leads to victory.

Armies choose doctrine, however, and not the other way around.3 On 

the one hand, the military occupation and the profession of arms require 
12

unified thinking and language that enables the efficient use of military 

power. On the other, military leaders do not control the application of 

force or its defining contexts, and such contexts such as where, when, and 

how are arguably more deterministic towards the outcome of fighting than 

the quality of doctrine.

In other words, military organizations codify thinking in writing to 

suit their requirements and responsibilities. As such doctrine as theory 

cannot stand on its own, not without the consideration of institutional or 

corporate culture, traditions, experiences, and other contexts that influence 

its writing. It may assume primacy in driving peacetime reforms, as it 

did with the US Army in the late 1970s through the early 1980s, but the 

reform of doctrine does not always lead to organizational change in the 

Army.4 When analyzing the success of fighting organizations that develop into learning organizations historically—ones that learn to fight better 

over time—attributing that improvement in fighting competence to doctrinal reforms presumes a deterministic effect of doctrinal reform, an effect 

which is not provable in all circumstances and requires careful study on its 

own. In fact, other aspects may prove for more deterministic in improving 

fighting competence, such as organizational culture, tradition, and perhaps 

most importantly, recent warfighting experience.5 Perhaps only tactical 

doctrine serves to complement the learning habits of the learning military 

organizations, and not necessarily drive them.6

The most recent edition of Army FM 3-0, Operations, appears to express a less certain tone than seen in earlier iterations of the FM, perhaps 

in recognition of recent operational experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Army doctrine balances between the Army’s current capabilities and situation with its projected requirements for future 

operations. At the same time, Army doctrine forecasts the 

immediate future in terms of organizational, intellectual, and 

technological developments. This requirement is particularly 

challenging for this edition of FM 3-0. . . . Army leaders must 

examine and debate the doctrine, measuring it against their experience and strategic, operational, and tactical realities. They 

must also recognize that while FM 3-0 can inform them of 

how to think about operations, it cannot provide a recipe for 

what to do on the battlefield.7

The central role doctrine plays both as an expression on how the Army 

thinks about fighting and as a basis for Army reform serves to orient thinking on organizational adaptation and learning as a product of accepted 
13

and codified thinking. However, placing doctrine in the center of organizational and institutional worldview may fail to consider how Army traditions, culture, and recent experience serve to drive the way the Army 

actually fights, learns, and adapts. Institutional consensus on the central 

role accepted thinking plays in determining the outcome of war may prove 

resilient to internal critique, as history can be shaped to reinforce this consensus.8

 Thus, when viewed from the inside of the Army, the doctrine-centric worldview may substitute institutional consensus and interest for a 

more self-critical, introspective, and objective appraisal on the efficacy 

of official publications. In essence, the Army controls the development of 

doctrine, but not military history. How elites in the Army that write and 

approve publications use military history to influence and inform doctrine 

remains more or less a function of its subjective utility.

The ideas of doctrinal determinism and the doctrine-centric force 

needs to be evaluated in recent history, particularly regarding on how the 

Army fought insurgency in Iraq. Have official publications, particularly 

operational counterinsurgency doctrine, served to inform on the idea of 

accepted and codified thinking as the source of reform driving learning 

and adaptation? Does doctrine, particularly operational counterinsurgency doctrine, serve as an indispensible means towards the development of 

Army units as learning organizations? The war in Iraq demonstrated the 

limits of ideas regarding doctrinal determinism and the doctrine-centric 

force, particularly in the sense that while doctrine can serve to inform 

practice it neither precedes action nor inherently remedies bad practices 

in the US Army tradition. When considering military operations in Iraq 

in 2007, the main reason for improvement in the security environment 

in Iraq centers on two factors. First, more time and experience in conducting COIN in Iraq increased the potential for operational art executed 

at the small unit level, company and above. Second, using this potential 

required a better operational approach at the theater level—to include 

dispersal of forces—and additional forces as part of the surge, which 

enabled the corps commander to address operational problems, such as 

insurgent safe havens and lines of communications without shifting forces in theater.

COIN doctrine proved informative, yet incidental to the results achieved 

and thus not a critical factor in learning and planning. Rather than an authoritative source of reform towards better practice, COIN doctrine in particular 

remains simply a source of information. The critical factor in achieving success has been and remains command leadership, particularly at the brigade 

level and below. If anything, fighting in Iraq indicates the necessity of oper-
14

ational art at lower levels of command. Consequently, the military history of 

OIF does not fit neatly into a doctrine deterministic argument or narrative.

Understanding operational art in Iraq, in how units reformed, learned, 

and adapted under good leadership with the right command climate is critical in understanding the military history of OIF. Perhaps the only way to 

understand operational art in OIF is through descriptive military history, a 

history that centers on individual commanders and how they thought about 

fighting. This history is perhaps the only way to gain sufficient familiarity with the war that could serve to inform both contemporary interpretation and future practice. Concerning the military professional and future 

commander, no theory in operational COIN doctrine is sufficient in depth, 

consistency, and context to replace the utility of descriptive military history. While the utility of official thinking on warfighting is necessary for 

the effective use of military power, its utility cannot substitute for military 

history, particularly in the education of future commanders of fighting organization. Thus doctrine is inherently subordinate to military history. As 

an enabler of thinking and visualization through study and reflection, for 

translating ideas into action, military history, more than doctrine, is truly a 

tool of military command.

The Necessity of Military History for Command Leadership

Richard Sinnreich has eloquently identified one of the key issues in 

the use of military history by modern armies:

Military educators might, of course, console themselves with the 

reminder that, after all, few officers will become senior commanders, and that, for most others, the distillation of history through 

doctrine, however incomplete, will suffice to meet professional 

needs. The reality is less comforting. Some junior officers eventually will become senior leaders, and current selection processes offer no assurance that historical literacy will be among their 

intellectual attainments. On the contrary, the institutional bias, if 

anything, is in the opposite direction. Moreover, if there is a perceptible trend in modern warfighting, at least among developed 

nations, it is the devolution of leadership responsibility downward. As recent conflicts have underlined, junior officers increasingly confront requirements formerly the province of more senior 

leaders, and for which prescriptive rules, however thoughtfully 

developed, will prove less and less useful.9

At first glance, Sinnreich’s writing in 2006 appears to claim that a 

greater knowledge of military history is required now more than ever, that 
15

as greater responsibility is placed in the hands of relatively junior officers 

in the context of modern wars, more educational efforts must be placed on 

the development of historical literacy among military professionals. This 

passage from Sinnreich seems to argue that more junior leaders increasingly face operational type problems, or problems that lack clear linear tactical actions, and thus require more historical literacy as an aid to thinking. 

The recent history of OIF seems to support this claim. Thus, if the Army is 

to benefit professionally from the military history of OIF—one that centers 

on operational art—then it is necessary the actions and reflections of individual commanders, even down to company level, and how they planned 

and sequenced tactical actions towards the goals of strategy. Such a military 

history is more detailed and more difficult to develop than one that starts 

with COIN doctrine, but it is ultimately more useful professionally towards 

the development of the next generation of officers and commanders. Some 

argue that the study of military history is an outdated form of academic and 

intellectual provincialism.10 However, the profession of arms retains its own 

unique requirements of knowledge and its own history in peacetime and in 

war, not divorced from the greater realities of other contexts, but so momentous in consequence that it requires careful study in its own right. The 

relevance of military history is of exponential importance.

The apparent narrowness of military history as a field is eclipsed by 

the change that war brings to human affairs. Perhaps it is the consequences of military history that provide one of the enduring imperatives to the 

military professional to understand military history. The other concerns 

the moral imperatives surrounding command and leadership in war, where 

the military commander bears the responsibility for achieving success, 

controlling force, and preserving blood and treasure. The two imperatives 

compel the knowledge and understanding of military history as an absolute requirement for military leadership. The mandate for historical literacy is thus built into the responsibilities of command and imposed on 

commanders by the unpredictable character of war itself.

The recognized need for historical literacy is as old as the written history of warfare, as old as Thucydides in his descriptive History of the Peloponnesian War.

11 If war is the permanent condition of human society as Thucydides claimed, then pursuit of historical literacy in military history remains 

an enduring requirement for the military professional. The pursuit of historical knowledge forms the foundation of the lifelong process of learning that 

aids the military professional in fighting wars. For the military professional, 

the desire to learn precedes the pursuit towards greater understanding and 

must be the most important personal source of motivation.
16

The pursuit of understanding and historical literacy is shaped indelibly by the means used to educate the military professional. The means are 

the form of education, and when combined with experience and reflection 

serve to hone the skill and competence of the military officer. As history 

often fails to fit neatly into theory without ignoring inconsistency, or into 

neatly categorized taxonomies or lessons learned captured for classroom 

instruction, the careful and personal study of military history for military 

professionals must be considered a career-long, if not life-long endeavor 

and an essential component in professional development.

History as an academic endeavor is also subject to bias, to shifting 

consensus of opinion over time.12 Thus it follows that any fixed opinion or 

official sanction presented as historical fact must always be viewed with 

skepticism, including the interpreted historical foundations of doctrine. 

Accepting things as facts or laws in military history through a reliance 

on officially sanctioned history or doctrine can lead to lockstep and unenlightened approaches to warfare based on misinformed doctrine or an 

over-reliance on personal experience.

On the other hand, the military professional may also be a commanding officer, and the burden of command operates within and is subject to 

the constraints of time, and the commander’s decisions are often far more 

consequential than those of other professionals. There is simply limited 

time for study, and often for reflection of both study and experience. Theory can prove intellectually comforting, where its appeal to universal utility 

negates the requirement of deep contextual understanding. At some point 

in military planning and operations, command decisions are required, and 

the limitations of available time serve to curtail detailed study and extended reflection to gain intuitive knowledge over time. Thus theory can 

negate the requirement to readdress base assumptions and inconsistency 

in a time-constrained environment, where one virtue of theory serves to 

prevent indecisiveness and inaction. As military organizations exist to act 

on a thinking enemy, theory aids the practitioner in action.

In the US Army the competition for time in an officer’s career means 

that operational assignments will often trump institutional requirements 

for officer education and development opportunities, particularly while 

the Army remains at war in Afghanistan. A higher value is placed on 

experiential learning and not on education. Officer schools that do teach 

some military history, such as the US Army Command and General Staff 

College, can only provide a superficial understanding of military history, 

as there is often little depth, and entire wars are covered in one two or 

four hour class. Preparation for class requires the speed-reading of mil-
17

itary history.13 This method of history instruction is akin to force-feeding, where reflection, thought, individual contribution, and evaluation of 

understanding places no intellectual or academic burden on the officer 

student.14 In this type of learning environment, the study of history produces no actual improvement in critical thinking or quality of insight, 

with little actual benefit to the military officer. Thus, the less intellectually rigorous the study of history becomes, the less value is the study 

of history to producing a better and more capable military professional 

and leader. It is both prophetic and self-fulfilling. History loses its central role in the education of officers, becoming no more or less valuable 

than any other portion of the curriculum. Furthermore, distilling history 

to principle, to useful facts or lessons learned, and simple interpretation 

may serve to make history more teachable in short classes, to reconcile 

the constraints of time with the institutional requirements to train and 

educate the military officer. On the other hand, historiography shows that 

the interpretation of history, the writing of history, changes over time, 

sometimes dramatically.

The Army is not an academic institution, but the academic study of 

military history is arguably more important and consequential than the 

mastery of doctrine, especially for commanding officers and those directly involved in planning for use of force. A proper educational balance is 

required, a balance that ensures officers understand and master doctrine 

while remaining historically informed and inquisitive, and held accountable for both. Within institutional military schools, mastery of officially 

sanctioned ideas will arguably prove more important than demonstrating 

competence in understanding military history. But mastery of consensus 

ideas on warfare is insufficient in war, where the autonomy of command 

necessitates individual skill and vision leading collective action. The path 

towards skill and acumen in military command in war fundamentally requires historical literacy, and more specifically a deep familiarity of military history that enables better judgment and decision-making. Learning 

and adapting in command towards better fighting in war is thus more reliant on history and context than doctrine, where doctrine is less a source of 

direction and information and more an enabler of execution.

Fundamentally, military leaders must recognize the role of doctrine and 

the limits of its utility when considered as a contiguous body of authoritative 

information, particularly in its educational purposes. It serves several essential 

purposes for military organizations. It enables military organizations to efficiently plan, train, and communicate in orders and in common professional 

language, terminology, and processes.15 Most importantly it serves to assist 
18

and inform the organization and training of military formations around the 

mission of fighting wars—the main purpose of any fighting organization—

while attempting to balance the tensions that exist within any doctrine. These 

tensions are persistent and stem from three major influences: the roots in history and continuity with the past, the requirements for relevancy in the present, 

and the necessity to remain valid in the near future.16 Doctrine must reflect a 

sound understanding of military history and theory, of successful and unsuccessful theory and practice in the past, at least in appearances. It must also 

serve to anticipate certain changes in warfare that may provide the military 

force with an advantage in the next conflict, without becoming too ambitious 

in attempting to divine revolutionary change that may in fact reflect the institutional bias towards a desired state of future warfare.17

Doctrine in some contexts can appear deterministic in the outcomes 

of war. History demonstrates doctrine can inhibit thinking on war and perhaps sow the seeds of disaster. However, ex post facto critiques of doctrinal thinking must inherent recognize two factors. First, during peacetime 

adversaries interact only in the abstract, in the minds of men and on paper. 

Secondly, the margins of success or failure in war can prove very thin, 

despite the outcomes. Victory seems more preordained after the fact than 

the actual adversaries may admit. When analyzing success or failure on 

the quality of pre-conflict thinking, historians must arguably remain conservative in their approach to determine the causes of success or failure. 

Thus, arguments that designate doctrine as a source of failure portending 

defeat must be scrutinized for the depth of thinking, consideration of contexts, and quality of argumentation. In analyzing doctrine in relation to 

warfighting, context is everything. The defeat of France in 1940 highlights 

this burden.

French Army interwar doctrine, based on their interpretation of the 

lessons of WWI, led to belief that method battle—highly centralized, 

tightly controlled, defensively oriented, and firepower intensive—

would prove superior to offensive oriented maneuver warfare, much 

as it had in WWI.18 This dominant view on the future of war sharply 

influenced the role of commanders in method battle, where control was 

viewed as more important than initiative in order to ensure that higher 

commanders retained their hands on the handle of the fan, in control of 

the battle.19 The perception and intellectual concept that method battle 

could sufficiently leverage control over the dynamic battlefield against 

a German Army educated and trained to fight decentralized through 

the initiative of subordinates led directly the disaster at Sedan in 1940. 

Stated simply, French doctrine failed to prepare its army for the next 
19

war, and in fact harmed it to the extent that it undermined their military 

strategy and led to defeat.

However, the margins of victory in the defeat of France hung on a 

couple of threads and a few panzer corps that broke through the French 

lines south of the village of Stonne and west of Sedan. The operational 

maneuver to the coast—the Sichelschnitt—although neat in concept, was 

a one-off event that while superbly executed, did not demonstrate a general competence of operational and strategic thinking on the part of the 

Germans, who failed in Soviet Russia. While French interwar doctrine 

certainly influenced the conduct of the war in 1940, it is nevertheless difficult to place doctrine as the center of a defeat argument, as without consideration of circumstance and context, the argument is immediately subject 

to historical contradiction. What is true of the French Army in 1940 and 

perhaps the US Army in 1982 is not necessarily true in today’s context. 

Rigorous and comprehensive research and history ultimately determine 

the validity of such claims on cause and effect.

Doctrine is thus more of an organizational tool, clearly not sufficient 

on its own in creating adaptive and thinking leaders.20 The idea of a doctrine-centered Army, though placing an absolute claim on the necessity of 

quality organizational thinking and writing, may create the perception of 

consequential and deterministic nature of official publications. In essence, 

no Army wants to be in the position of the French Army in 1940, saddled 

with narrow thinking that limited the army prior to its defeat, with thin 

margins for success or failure. However, doctrinal determinism, while perhaps more valid for analyzing the defeat of France in 1940, are not valid 

in all cases of success or failure in modern war, and not for the debate 

surrounding US Army counterinsurgency doctrine published in 2006 and 

its supposed effects on the Army’s performance in Iraq.

The debate extending five years from the publication of Army Field 

Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency and its supposed broad adoption by the 

military provide a snapshot of a history or narrative that makes a claim 

for doctrinal determinism.21 In that vein, doctrine, when good, adequately 

prepares commanders and units for the fight prior to employment; when 

bad, it poorly educates and prepares commanders and units for the wrong 

fight and potentially sets up the force for mission failure. It is simple argument that starts with a general claim rather than a narrow one, a deduction 

based on the assumption of the centricity of doctrine in Army thinking 

and performance in war. This assumption, however, biases proper research 

and analysis, is perhaps prejudicial to true learning, and is not validated in 

recent history.
20

Contemporary Arguments Surrounding Counterinsurgency 

Doctrine

Army FM 3-24, published in December 2006 immediately prior to the 

announced change in strategy by President George Bush, represented the 

first major adjustment addressing counterinsurgency doctrine in over 20 

years. Much of the success attributed to General David Petraeus in 2007 

during the Surge nested well with the argument that doctrine in the form 

of FM 3-24 preceded effective action, primarily as he was the lead proponent for the new doctrine as the commander of the Combined Arms Center 

at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, prior to his appointment as commander of 

Multi-National Forces Iraq in January 2007. Circumstances thus aligned 

to give the manual immediate creditability based on the strong reputation 

of General Petraeus.

The major critique of FM 3-24 is that it leans too far in the direction 

of population-centric COIN (PC-COIN) while deemphasizing the role of 

armed force or the threat of force in the pursuit of COIN campaign goals.22

The ability of the counterinsurgent force to bring sufficient destructive 

force, or the threat of force, to bear on the insurgent force is critical in 

any insurgency. If most insurgencies end in a negotiated outcome, then 

negotiating from a position of strength—strength that is manifest in significant military or paramilitary capability—is an enduring requirement if the 

counterinsurgent-supported government is to achieve a desired outcome. 

The COIN force must retain the potential to compel the enemy to do its 

will as a basis for negotiations. Negotiating from a position of self-induced 

military weakness is one of the main reasons that the British Army failed 

in its efforts to pacify Basra in Iraq in late 2007, necessitating the Iraqi led 

operation Charge of the Knights in early 2008.23

In leaning towards one direction, the manual creates a list of principles 

and imperatives for COIN, paradoxes of COIN operations, as well as successful and unsuccessful practices that appear simultaneously dogmatic 

and opaque, but are claimed as proven in the history of combating insurgency.24 In claiming the existence of principles—principles that are always 

true—the authors are giving the impression that the intellectual rigor, logic, and reason behind the claim to principle are in fact are as provable and 

incontrovertible as the nine principles of war established by J. F. C. Fuller 

in his seminal work The Foundations of the Science of War, published 

in 1926.25 In fact, contrarians argue that the principles espoused in FM 

3-24 are not proven historically, and while may prove correct in certain 

contexts, are not universally correct in all circumstances.26 The arguments 

that center on the presumed effects of FM 3-24 on the conduct of OIF, pos-
21

itive and negative, assume a deterministic, cause and effect relationship 

between doctrine and outcomes. The issue of doctrine and consequences 

requires further investigation.

Is Doctrine and Consequential? The US ArmyExperience in OIF

The consequences of incorrect doctrine are perhaps overblown when 

analyzed historically in Iraq, and this includes any doctrine or approach 

espoused by one camp or another in the COIN doctrine debate. Operational COIN doctrine as seen in FM 3-24 may not broadly describe the 

way units Army units actually fight, and is thus not necessarily a factor 

in success. If this is the case, then it follows that the center point of the 

argument of population or enemy centric approaches, as a critique of 

doctrine sufficiency and fidelity in fact and in history, may prove useless 

when trying to determine its effect on conduct. While it is easy to assume the corruptive effects of bad doctrine, particularly in the US Army 

culture fixed on the idea of doctrinal centricity since the 1970s, it is 

not clear that operational doctrine actually described and changed the 

way the Army actually fought, particularly in Iraq. More consequential 

is perhaps the use of doctrine as a basis for education to indoctrinate everything from tactics through military leadership which perhaps assumes 

that all forms of Army doctrine—tactical, operational, and administrative—are of equal utility.27

Arguments on methods in COIN may fail to address the tremendous 

influence of US military culture and tradition in war and how it influences 

the way the US and the Army actually fights. In his book The American 

Way of War, historian Russell Weigley describes the American way of 

war as confined mostly to strategies of annihilation.28 Unlimited war aims 

combine with virtually inexhaustible resources ensures that annihilation 

surpassed attrition in US war strategy.29 The notion of total destruction of 

the enemy’s forces became not simply an ideal object of fighting, but the 

only object of fighting.30 Essentially, the sum effects of American military 

tradition and culture, when considered in total, serve to shape how the US 

fights. Rather than an American way of war, Weigley is actually describing 

an American way of warfare, a form of warfare that assumes a quality and 

character all its own once fighting starts, and ultimately supersedes what 

doctrine prescribes or anticipates.31 Weigley claims an American way of 

fighting, one shaped through tradition, which is generally applicable to 

most contexts.

A more recent argument offered by Antulio Echevarria argues that 

there is no American way of war, but there is an American way of battle.32
22

In essence, the American way of battle is a consequence of the bifurcation of responsibilities in war, where the military concentrates on winning the battles and politicians are concerned with winning the peace.33

In its sphere of responsibility, the only requirement of the military is to 

win the battle and defeat the enemy, which should secure victory, lead to 

peace, and end the war.34 War, in the eyes of the Army, is about winning 

the battles and campaigns. Strategic success should naturally follow. The 

ability of certain military leaders to operate in the strategic realm, to negotiate and solidify the peace after the fighting ends, is questionable, and 

is perhaps influenced by the thinking that good combat operations and 

campaigns fix strategic problems, even if strategy has failed to describe 

the problem effectively.35

Despite their differences, the ideas of Weigley and Echevarria are 

complementary and appeal to a dominant American tradition of warfare 

in the last 75 years, one involving a tremendous application of material 

resources to address ostensibly military problems, whether it is destroying 

Nazi Germany or Al Qaeda in Iraq. Both wars proved and continue to 

prove tremendously costly in resources, but less so in blood than in treasure. In Total War, and in Limited War minus the very large ground force, 

the US military can leverage virtually limitless resources to win the next 

battle or the short campaign.36 The major problem centers on the management of resources, training, doctrinal development, and the organization 

of campaigns and operations to achieve a successful outcome.37 With significant resources even in Limited Wars such as OIF, arguably the main 

problems of war hinge on the optimization of processes and the discovery 

of efficiencies that lead to better management of the war effort. War then 

is a technical problem requiring a better scientific approach, a complex but 

solvable problem of science and engineering.

Recent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has demonstrated that resource-intensive limited warfare in the form of counterinsurgency is no 

recipe for success or the outcome of good strategy. Instead, money substitutes for strategy, and in its effort as applied towards nation building actually impedes rather than enables progress. Furthermore, the ability to fall 

back on extensive resources may inhibit true understanding and problem 

solving, enabling a self-imposed cognitive isolation from the battlefield, 

where the requirement for deep contextual understanding and detailed 

local knowledge are overwhelmed by the desire for easy, shallow, and 

costly palliative solutions. Rather than money being an additional weapon 

of warfare, money becomes an indiscriminate weapon of mass disruption 

and corruption. War, whether COIN or conventional, is not a problem of 
23

social engineering that can appeal to the laws of the physical universe as 

a basis for solving complex human problems in war. However, fixating on 

arguments of doctrinal sufficiency may ultimately mask this problem and 

fail to describe how military organizations become learning organizations 

in war, particularly concerning the effects of FM 3-24 on the Army as it 

fought in Iraq.

Thus the idea that doctrine determines action in the tradition of the 

US Army—that doctrine such as FM 3-24 is either good in that it was 

a requirement and precursor to success in Iraq, or that it is bad in that it 

will corrupt the force—is not born out historically. In fact, the ability of 

the Army to leverage massive resources in virtually every form of warfare leads to strategies of both attrition and annihilation, regardless of the 

Army’s doctrine and views of its history, even with the major limitation, 

nowadays, of the small size of the professional Army in the form of brigade combat teams. The question of best methods or approaches in COIN, 

whether population centric or something else are simply an extension in 

the belief in the deterministic effects of doctrine.

The ideal of the doctrinally centered Army is not inherently flawed 

with respect to education. However, the function of doctrine in enabling 

military organizations to fight more efficiently and effectively is separate 

from the autonomy of the command and the requirement for commanders to think and lead effectively in the face of a lethal enemy. In essence, 

doctrine enables organizations to execute the directives of command. 

Military history, on the other hand, educates commanders on things to 

think about, acting as an aid to decision making. Doctrine is simply 

insufficient as the basis of education for commanders and future commanders. Military history should act as the basis for officer education 

and development, particularly for those that choose to enter the combat 

arms, such as infantry and armor.

Clausewitz on Education and Developing Commanders

Carl von Clausewitz claims in On War that theory in form of a true 

positive doctrine – or model – for all war is unattainable, as war in practice 

will never be subordinate to the written theories that attempt to control it. 

He wrote:

Given the nature of the subject, we must remind ourselves that it 

is simply not possible to construct a model for the art of war that 

can serve as scaffolding on which the commander can rely for 

support at any time. Whenever he has to fall back on his innate 

talent, he will find himself outside the model and in conflict with 
24

it; no matter how versatile the code, the situation will always lead 

to the consequences we have already alluded to: talent and genius 

operate outside the rules, and theory conflicts with practice.38

On its face, Clausewitz’s claim seems uncontroversial, particularly to 

those that have experienced war. On the other hand, the claim on the unattainability of a positive doctrine at some point inherently undermines the doctrinal foundations of some Western military thought, particularly US military 

thought heavily invested in the work of Baron Antoine de Jomini.39 At the very 

least, Clausewitz is attacking the notion or assumption of the enduring quality, utility, or comparative superiority of military doctrines beyond their initial 

application and contexts, when the seeming trivialities of friction and chance 

converge to impose change when theory proves incorrect or inconsistent.

Theory in the form of doctrine is inherently flawed from inception, 

but there is risk in assuming that due to its flaws it is ultimately useless. 

Rather, it is simply more or less useful depending on a variety of circumstances and the ability of the commander. Historically, US Army doctrine 

served as the basis for organizing and training military forces, instructing 

tactics, and to give the peace-trained officer something of the viewpoint of 

the veteran.40 Though imperfect, theory in this form serves as a source of 

ideas based on tactical lessons learned in fighting in recent history, while 

avoiding abstract theories.41 At the time, US Army doctrinal literature was 

designed to provide the untested soldier, leader, and unit the ability to fight 

through initial emotion of fear caused by uncertainty common to all armies 

fighting the first battle. In this view of theory, there is little projection of 

abstraction into the future or prediction of revolutionary technologies that 

would radically change the nature of war in the near-term.

Contradictions inherently exist between theory and practice, in thinking about war while at peace versus thinking while fighting. History 

demonstrates the dialectic nature of both, a thesis-antithesis-synthesis, 

where thinking about fighting changes upon interaction with a dangerous 

enemy. Ultimately, there can be clear dichotomy between the art and science of war or between theory and application, as relevant and essential 

learning occurs from both.42 Knowledge however cannot be confined to 

the understanding or mastery of complicated processes that seeks to leverage control of the complex. Doctrine cannot substitute for the detailed 

study of military history, particularly for the officers that command combat organizations directly tasked to close with and destroy the enemy.

There is also significant risk in doctrine becoming dogma, particularly 

to those officers that spend much of their career wedded to the mastery of 
25

processes and complicated models in the context of complex military affairs. Written principles may masquerade as absolute truths, creating intellectual barriers to reflection through simply assigning a fixed and enduring 

principle in doctrine to that which is ephemeral, arbitrary, or lacking in 

intellectual rigor.43 A main argument against FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency 

is the assigning of principle to that which is not always true.44

With no military history foundation to reflect from, leaders and future commanders raised in this environment are at risk of believing, unreflectively, in the absolute authority, rather than the particular value of, 

doctrine. In this context, a learning organization is assessed as an outcome of doctrine mastery, in relative cognitive isolation. But a military 

organization cannot often set the terms of interacting with the enemy, so 

the learning is also function of the inability to control an enemy with a 

will, while conserving one’s strength. The true test of a learning organization comes after making contact with a lethal foe, in the sheer effort 

in bending the enemy to your will. The outcomes of fighting determine 

the true quality of units called learning organizations, not doctrine or 

mastery of doctrinal procedures, whether or not doctrine shapes or determines performance.

Indeed, the emphasis that US Army doctrine places on particular heuristics in the form of decision-making modeling tools and processes may 

also compound the problem of a dogmatic approach to doctrine. The dependence on certain heuristic models with scientific, staff-centric processes with only an abstract view of the tactical environment, relying on significant and perhaps arbitrary feedback mechanisms, can give the impression 

that the Army places far more credence in the science of war that in the art 

of war.45 The use of prescriptive and detailed heuristics with a façade of 

scientific process—backed by direct and authoritative language—to drive 

decision-making can lead the practitioner to place far more faith in process 

and with a bias towards scientific approaches than is actually merited.46

The superficialities of complicated planning procedures can give the appearance of control while providing little control in actuality.

Several heuristics dominate Army thinking and planning for military 

operations. The operations process, formerly known as the military decision-making process, or MDMP, is the primary heuristic that the Army 

uses to solve problems as detailed in Army FM 5-0, The Operations Process. More recently, the Army has adopted another heuristic, known institutionally as targeting and captured in Army FM 3-60, The Targeting 

Process.

47 According to FM 3-60, targeting is the process of selecting and 

prioritizing targets and matching the appropriate response to them, consid-
26

ering operational requirements and capabilities.48 This includes the both 

lethal and non-lethal methods of targeting.

Targeting is an offspring of the now out-of-favor terminology Effects-Based Operations (EBO) or Effects-Based Approach to Operations (EBAO), unless it is merely coincidental that the same language 

of effects and changing system behavior appears in the FM.49 In spite 

of General Mattis’ argument about the insufficiency of EBAO in targeting complex human systems, the Army continues to subscribe to 

an effects-based approach in both targeting combat systems as well as 

human systems.50 Whether or not the Army has heeded, considered, accepted, or dismissed the main critiques of EBO or EBAO is unclear.51

The perception of the Army’s bias towards heuristic models, technical 

solutions, and staff-centric processes in problem solving is certainly 

reinforced in FM 3-60.52

Recognizing both the utility and limitations of doctrine is thus the 

key. Conceptually, this span of utility is hierarchical and perhaps functional. The closer the military organization is to results of the practical 

application of doctrine, the more immediate the feedback regarding the 

efficacy and utility of the doctrine. As such, tactical doctrine often serves 

as a direct aid to fighting, whereas operational doctrine might better be 

described as an aid to efficient planning. In both cases, doctrine proves 

useful or it does not, at which point a new technical solution or modification to doctrine is proposed. The difficultly in assessing efficacy and 

utility of doctrine becomes more difficult as one approaches the higher 

echelons of military organizations. Experience is more direct and concrete at lower echelons, and more abstract at higher echelons, especially 

when fighting insurgencies.53 Operationally oriented doctrine, such as 

FM 3-24 (Counterinsurgency), FM 3-0 (Operations), and FM 5-0 (The 

Operations Process) do not receive the same immediate feedback. Thus 

assessing utility is difficult with respect to its ability to improve organizational fighting ability.

Arguably, heuristic models are the Army’s only institutional way of 

dealing with abstract and complex problems. But the more abstract the 

problem, the harder it is to assess the efficacy of the actual model, to 

claims that complicated processes are positively influencing the environment. While manual after manual contain a few intellectual caveats that 

warn against attempting to use the manual as a checklist, it is easy to see 

how a few caveats can get swept up in the hundreds of pages of text. The 

amount and scope of Army doctrine may encourage doctrinaire approaches to thinking and operations.
27

A key ingredient missing from the equation is the individual, particularly the exceptional officer and commander, unbound intellectually and 

not constrained by institutional beliefs or desires. How does doctrine interact with those officers that own or gain, as Clausewitz asserts, either a 

talent or genius for war?

Rule Breakers: The Genius and the Talented

Clausewitz claims that talent and genius operate outside of the rules, 

and such rules must include those communicated via principle, process, or 

restriction in war arbitrarily written in doctrine that fails the test of history, 

practice, or exercise in logic.54 History provides numerous examples of 

military geniuses, functioning intellectually outside of his contemporaries 

and the current zeitgeist, operating outside of the contemporary rules and 

achieve success. Perhaps a better argument is the military genius exposes 

the oversimplified rules of bad and overly prescriptive theory, or more 

simply, geniuses are better at identifying contradictions in theory and exploiting them.55 Regardless of the sufficiency of theory, genius is arguably 

not a common trait and thus insufficiently reliable as a requirement for 

successful military commanders.

Talent becomes the critical requirement, and perhaps the greatest 

determining variable in success. Although not all officers are endowed 

with talent in military affairs, talent can be developed through careful 

study combined with experience. The distribution and development of 

talent in the form of military officers within the organization is more 

important than a haphazard and unpredictable reliance on the pursuit 

and harvesting of military genius through more paternalistic or nepotistic approaches. If the variable of talent can be influenced towards the 

positive gain of the military organization, then great emphasis must be 

placed on both the development of talent and ensuring talented officers 

are in command.

Relevant, accountable, and rigorous education must serve as the fundamental basis of talent development within the officer corps, as it is perhaps the most determinant human factor in the origin of military success. 

All education and degrees are not the same, however, and appropriate for 

officers preparing to lead combat organizations. For those that hope to 

command combat organizations, the central component to this education 

must be military history, from undergraduate education and beyond, rather 

than an irrelevant business degree from an online, for-profit university. 

The scope and method of education of the military officer provides the 

theoretical framework that serves to shape and mold talent within military 
28

organizations. Clausewitz argues education, or study, is the essential requirement for theory, not doctrine.56 He further argues:

Theory need not be a positive doctrine, a sort of manual for 

action. . . . It is an analytical investigation leading to the close 

acquaintance with the subject; applied to experience—in our 

case to military history—it leads to thorough familiarity with it. 

The closer it comes to that goal, the more it proceeds from the 

objective form of a science to the subjective form of a skill, the 

more effective it will prove in areas where the nature of the case 

admits no arbiter but talent. It will, in fact, become an active 

ingredient of talent. . . . Theory then becomes a guide to anyone 

who wants to learn war from books; it will light his way, ease 

his progress, train his judgment, and help him to avoid pitfalls.57

Thus the basis for educating military officers and talent development 

is the careful and continual study of military history above all else, and not 

doctrine. Talent is developed through study and vicarious learning to gain 

familiarity and then honed through experience. Overemphasizing the study 

of doctrine at the expense of history as well as the shaping history to create 

doctrine that suits institutional preferences, results in both the suppression 

of talent and perhaps courts military disaster. The Russo-Japanese War provides an example. The offensive concepts and doctrine that dominated the 

opposing armies in World War I failed despite the knowledge of effects of 

modern weaponry from the recent Russo-Japanese War in 1905.58

The most critical variable to military success is talented command 

leadership, commanders who are themselves products of their education, 

both formal and experiential. The nature of the learning organization is 

thus critically influenced by the commander’s education and experience. 

The recent historical role of doctrine in developing leaders, particularly in 

the recent tradition of the US Army, is important to understand both historically and in informing on the efficacy of the idea of the doctrine-centric 

Army. The Army’s post-Vietnam War reform efforts of the 1970s, and the 

ideas of two senior Army leaders at the time concerning the role of doctrine, serve to provide perspective as to why the view that the Army is a 

doctrine-centric organization continues to this day.

Divergent Philosophy on the Role of Doctrine:

Generals DePuy and Cushman

Doctrine and leadership are inherently intertwined. Defining the role 

of doctrine in the Army leads to promotion of certain viewpoints on authority as it is institutionalized within both the operating force and educa-
29

tional systems that develop officers and NCOs throughout their careers. 

Over time, as the Army orients toward internal sources of authority—field 

manuals—which promote certain views will expand through the indoctrination of officers throughout their career, where the collective brain aligns 

with the originating view on the role of doctrine. The seed of an idea thus 

grows into an institutional norm and operational practice.

The US Army owes significant portions of its doctrinal heritage of the 

last 35 years to the vision of General William DePuy. DePuy, a World War 

II veteran and division commander in Vietnam, was an associate and subordinate of General Creighton Abrams and the right man at the right time 

to assume broad reform responsibilities under the mandate established by 

Abrams during the final years of the Vietnam War. DePuy’s responsibilities coalesced upon his selection as the first commander of the US Army 

Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) in 1973. His tremendous influence on Army doctrine is indisputable, not in actual product but in the 

role doctrine assumed at the center of Army reforms. The function and role 

of doctrine changed during his tenure as the first commander of TRADOC. 

Doctrine, based on certain concepts of warfare, assumed the central role in 

reforming the Army, of linking programming, budgeting, and combat systems development to training, organization, and equipping, ultimately to the 

point where the Army became a doctrine-centric organization.59

DePuy’s experience in World War II and in the Army, the loss of life 

due to officer incompetence, led him retain a pessimistic view on human 

ability and initiative.60 The tactically inept Army of the mid-1970s, due in 

particular to the commanding officers of tactical formations, required immediate attention if US Army forces in Europe stood a chance of beating 

the Soviets.61 He believed that military organizations operated best when 

told what to do in simple terms.62 Field manuals would serve as the means 

of clearly organizing military thought into action, to ensure that units in 

field could fight immediately and outnumbered against a foe with similar 

capabilities, and thus addressing the immediate requirement of improving 

Army forces preparing to fight the Warsaw Pact forces. This framework 

would serve to enable performance-based training and evaluation and 

build combat organizations capable of fighting and winning against the 

most dangerous threat, which at the time was the Soviet and Warsaw Pact 

forces facing NATO forces across the Iron Curtain.63 The institutional purpose of reforming the Army as well as the practical purpose of defeating 

enemy forces aligned under doctrine the practical purpose enabling the 

institutional purpose. DePuy was convinced that his ideas for Army and 

doctrine were the right approach to reforms, and to ensure the implemen-
30

tation of his ideas, he incorporated other like-minded officers into very 

small cadres of doctrine-writing teams that he controlled, relying heavily 

on hand-selected elites such as General Donn Starry.64 If the proper doctrine can be deduced and distilled towards a coherent training methodology, from individual soldier training to operational collective tasks, then 

arguably the result will be a force prepared to fight and win wars, even at 

the immediate outset of hostilities.

Major General John H. Cushman was the commander of the US 

Army’s Combined Arms Center (CAC) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, 

from 1973 to 1976, during DePuy’s command at TRADOC. Traditionally, CAC served as the Army’s integrating center, where ideas promoted 

at the various branch schools were integrated into coherent doctrine.65

Cushman’s ideas on the role of doctrine differed significantly from 

DePuy’s. He believed that organizational ability was tied directly to how 

effective the organization could harvest the collective initiative of individuals in pursuit of a common purpose.66 This approach assumes that 

creative potential within organizations is more widely distributed than 

DePuy would claim. Doctrine, in Cushman’s view, was a combination 

of theory, experience, and inductive reasoning, and would serve to guide 

versus bind the hands the practitioner.67

DePuy’s views oriented on fixing the most pressing problem—the general tactical incompetence of the Army—promoting new training methods 

being incorporated at tactical training schools via training circulars prior to 

the publication of FM 100-5 in 1976. Fixing the tactical incompetence of 

the Army was clearly more important than making better military thinkers, 

at least at the time. Combined with the isolation of Cushman and CAC, 

DePuy’s triumph ensured that a more prescriptive, directive approach to 

training and doctrine would triumph over Cushman’s more descriptive and 

intellectual approach to doctrine.68

DePuy and Cushman also held divergent views regarding the role of 

the Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC) in educating and 

training Army field grade officers. DePuy believed the scope of officer 

education should be limited to training officers to manage Army divisions 

in combat, while at the same time learning how to train subordinate units 

on how to fight.69 Cushman’s view was broader on the role of the college. 

He believed that officer education must go beyond DePuy’s view, and that 

officers must become better thinkers in order to face the intellectual challenges of service as field grade officers.70
31

DePuy, on the other hand, saw a different problem. Officers must be 

able to lead immediately when assigned to a unit, and as such developing 

immediate duty competence—fighting competence—became an absolute 

requirement for branch schools. No longer could the Army rely on the 

mobilization base for building combat power. Instead, the Army must fight 

and win with what it has. Doctrine may prove sufficient to this task, but 

as officers increase in rank and responsibility, the requirements of fighting competence expands to encompass more than the duties of the officer 

within his organization.

Stated simply, the divergent views encapsulate two approaches to officer education and leadership: What we want officers to do in their executive 

duties and responsibilities versus what we want officers to be—or eventually be—in regards to an program that can maximize and leverage their innate talent and ability. Focusing on the latter—the officer in being—should 

thus mentally and intellectually prepare the officer for command, develop 

adaptability, and inculcate good learning habits that enables better thinking 

and military decision-making. If, however, the incentives and rewards are 

skewed towards the mastery of doctrine and not educational performance, 

then we risk promoting conformist values and shallow thinking at the ultimate expense of fighting competence and leader development. Furthermore, if the reward of doctrinal mastery is higher rank and responsibility, 

then it follows logically that ambitious individual officers will determine 

that the mastery of doctrine is more personally and professionally important 

and consequential than that of other disciplines, such as military history. 

Indeed, intellectual pursuits outside of military education are not required 

and perhaps even discouraged. Thus, from the very beginning of an officer’s 

career, the path of development and education can lead to habits of mind that 

once manifest in positions of command authority can serve to kill a learning 

organization, whether by the culture of the leadership or no latent cognitive 

potential outside of doctrinaire thinking.

Concerning Cushman’s view, he believed doctrinal education insufficient to both the task of creating better staff officers and commanders 

and generating the ideal military officer limited only by their talent and 

ability.71 In this view, the training of officers to do things within the constraints defined institutionally does not in itself result in officers being 

better, where the better officer is characterized as more professionally capable, through learning and adapting, of facing contingency and fighting 

and winning in war. Fundamental to this view is the understanding that 

doctrine, however farsighted, detailed, and rigorously applied, cannot anticipate all contingencies that face the warfighter, account for the friction 
32

in war. He believed that instructive sources must be descriptive and informative, and not prescriptive and direct.72

It is arguable that the Army perspective on warfare of the last 36 years 

is less descriptive than prescriptive, and that doctrine offers a good way to 

approach complex problems versus a checklist of things to do to be successful in war. Indeed, contemporary US Army doctrine warns against its rigid 

application. “Conflict is fundamentally a human endeavor characterized by 

violence, uncertainty, chance, and friction. Land operations are inherently 

tied to the human dimension; they cannot be reduced to a simple formula or 

checklist.”73 Certainly DePuy would agree with this statement.74

Regardless of the disputed particulars with the 1976 version of FM 100-5 

and the debate following its publication, the role of doctrine was firmly in the 

DePuy school. Future iterations of FM 100-5 would shift emphasis on certain 

types of operations and reestablish the primacy of combined arms maneuver 

as well as initiate the thinking behind operational art, but none of this changed 

the fact that DePuy had established a four-star Army headquarters that retained control over the Army’s thinking about warfare. His subordinates, most 

notably Generals Starry and Gorman, would build on what DePuy started.75

Parallel to DePuy’s efforts in shaping the doctrine-centric force, the efforts of General Paul Gorman were perhaps the most tactically consequential 

in solidifying the long-term gains of DePuy’s vision within the Army. Gorman 

led the effort to establish the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, 

California.76 He also was the major proponent of the Army Training and Evaluation Program (ARTEP).77 In essence, the ARTEP was a way for the Army to 

simplify and unify training processes, making it easier for units to manage individual and unit level training to increase combat readiness. The combination 

of the directed training requirements at echelon by the ARTEP and the evaluation of unit performance of these tasks at the NTC and its later siblings the 

Combined Maneuver Training Center (CMTC) and Joint Readiness Training 

Center (JRTC) would cement the link between doctrine and unit performance.

A contemporary account of armored cavalry squadron commander in the 

mid-1980s informs on the perception of some field grade officers at the time. 

He viewed the objective of the maneuver training scenarios in which armor 

and mechanized brigades and battalions fought against an opposing force 

(OPFOR) organized along Soviet lines as a great process of manipulation to 

coerce units into embracing doctrine, unquestioningly.78 He further expounds:

And the game is set up in a way that only the doctrine will prevail. If you don’t play by the doctrine, the super OPFOR is going 

to kick your ass . . . that it’s all about adhering to doctrine . . . 
33

that this was trying to create an officer corps that was a bunch 

of automatons, that attributed to the checklist and the decision 

matrix a kind of sacred status. On the one hand, to the extent 

that you want to have a doctrinally informed officer corps, that’s 

a good thing. On the other hand, if you want to have an officer corps that has to the capacity to actually think and innovate 

in response to situations where the doctrine doesn’t apply, then 

you’re not building the right kind of officer corps.79

In essence, adherence to doctrine was enforced at all levels of training 

through rewards and incentives, and in the case of the Army, the only rewards and incentives that matter are promotion and command selection. 

Regardless of DePuy’s vision regarding doctrine, eventually the institutional and operational sides of the Army came together to support, promote, and reinforce the changes sparked by DePuy and others.

The consequences of DePuy’s views of doctrine as a driver of change 

have not been studied in great detail to the extent that a reasonable critique 

informs on how DePuy’s view—the Army’s view—backstopped by both 

the Army’s bureaucracy and institutional schools, affected the quality of 

the Army’s professional military leadership over time. Incentivizing adherence to doctrine leads to the problem of confirmation bias, as it aligns 

the interests of the promoters of doctrine and the practitioners in the field, 

where the practitioners eventually become advocates and promoters. When 

advocates become senior commanders and perhaps general officers, it is 

arguable that the learning process of any Army combat unit concerning adaptation and innovation, particularly in peacetime, will self-orient towards 

doctrine. This learning process may not produce the command leadership, 

and thus the learning organizations, that the Army needs in war.

Changing security environments change institutional thinking. Indeed, FM 100-5 has been significantly revised since DePuy’s tenure as the 

TRADOC commander, beginning in 1982 with the publication of AirLand 

Battle, followed by 1986, and 1993. In 2003, FM 100-5 became FM 3-0, 

and has since been changed and republished two times. The reasons for 

the changes to Operations include incorporation of operational thinking 

and art, changes in fighting concepts, changes and anticipated changes in 

technology, a transformed security environment following the end of the 

Cold War, and the collective experience of counterinsurgency campaigns 

in the Army since 11 September 2001.

Despite the importance the Army places on doctrine, and despite the 

expansion of the its role since DePuy took over TRADOC in 1973, the 
34

argument of doctrine as a driver of change and as a source of reforms not 

only in peacetime, but also in combat fails as applied to OIF and the publication of FM 3-24 in 2006. There was no battle of the minds going on in 

the mid-1970s, no selecting of DePuy’s view or Cushman’s.80 The DePuy 

reforms proved absolutely critical in fixing the tactical incompetence of 

the Army, but they may have also biased the thinking of officers due to 

the emphasis placed on doctrine. In any case, that argument has yet to be 

substantiated in sufficient detail along the lines of Robert Doughty’s book 

on the French Army doctrine after WWI, titled Seeds of Disaster.

81

Instead of doctrine, the search for understanding must center on the 

concept of operational art and how the potential for operational art in 

smaller units increased over time during OIF. The longer the Army stayed 

in Iraq, the more the potential for operational art increased. As the potential 

for operational art increased—combined with the appropriate operational 

approach that the surge enabled—the actions of Army units at all echelons improved the security environment. Understanding how commanders 

leveraged operational art in OIF—in their own words—will demonstrate 

that a narrative that places COIN doctrine in the center is wrong and inaccurately attributes learning and adapting in organizations to the myth of 

doctrinal determinism, a myth that may persist to this day.
35

Notes

1. Since 1976 with the publication FM 100-5, Operations, known as the 

Active Defense, the FM has been rewritten eight times. Under the number 100-

5, the FM was rewritten in 1982, 1986, 1992, and 1996. In 2001, FM 100-5 was 

renumbered FM 3-0. FM 3-0 was rewritten and published in 2008. Change 1 to 

FM 3-0 was published in 2011, and has been superseded by Army Doctrinal Reference Publication (ADRP) 3-0, which is itself subordinate to the Army Doctrinal Publication (ADP) 3-0, Unified Land Operations.

2. Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 100-5, Operations 

(Washington, DC: Department of the Army, June 1993), iv. See also v-vii. To 

paraphrase for further reinforcement, “As the Army’s keystone doctrine, FM 

100-5 describes how the Army thinks about the conduct of operations. FM 

100-5 undergirds all of the Army’s doctrine, organization, training, materiel, 

leader development, and soldier concerns. Never static, always dynamic, the 

Army’s doctrine is firmly rooted in the realities of current capabilities. At the 

same time, it reaches out with a measure of confidence to the future. Doctrine captures the lessons of past wars, reflects the nature of war and conflict 

in its own time, and anticipates the intellectual and technological developments that will bring victory now and in the future. . . . This doctrine retains 

the best of all the doctrine that has gone before and expands upon it as 

appropriate. . . . Throughout, doctrine reflects the adaptation of technology 

to new weapons systems and capabilities, organizations, missions, training, 

leader development, and soldier support. In this way, doctrine continues to 

be the Army’s engine of change.

3. Paul Johnston, “Doctrine is Not Enough: The Effect of Doctrine on the 

Behavior of Armies,” Parameters 30, no. 3 (Autumn 2000), 36.

4. Johnston, “Doctrine is Not Enough,” 36.

5. Johnston, “Doctrine is Not Enough,” 36. Johnston provides several examples of how experience and culture influence the outcome of war rather far greater than doctrine, including the German, French, and British interwar thinking 

and doctrine, and how culture and experience preceded the writing of doctrine. 

Concerning the US Army, Johnston also describes the dissonance between the 

ways the first Gulf War was fought and how the Army thought it fought based on 

its contemporary doctrine (AirLand Battle).

6. Daniel P. Marston, Phoenix From the Ashes: The Indian Army in the 

Burma Campaign (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003). Marston’s book 

captures tactical and organizational reforms of the Indian Army from 1942 

to 1945, stemming from defeat at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army. 

While the reforms of tactical doctrine played a significant role, the reforms 

would bear little fruit without the pursuit of Indianization of the officer corps, 

the recruiting of non-martial races, and the critical role of the senior leadership 

of the Indian Army, to include Slim, Wavell, and Auchinleck. Marston argues 

that the Indian Army, never the main effort and perhaps the least resourced of 

all the British military field forces, was truly a learning organization.
36

7. Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 3-0, Operations, Change 1, 

(Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 2011), ix.

8. For an example of history used to shape the institutional world, see Robert H. Scales, Certain Victory: The US Army in the Gulf War (Fort Leavenworth, 

KS: Government Printing Office, 1994). This official history of the US Army in 

the first Gulf War reinforces the Army’s view on the strength of its doctrine and 

the central role it played in the war.

9. Richard Hart Sinnreich, “Awkward Partners: Military History and American Military Education,” in The Past as Prologue: The Importance of History 

to the Military Profession, ed. Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich 

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 73-74.

10. Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh, “Why Military History Matters: Another Perspective,” 5 January 2010, http://warhistorian.org/wordpress/?p=2122 (accessed 

19 May 2011). Hsieh argues for the maintenance of military history as a distinct 

field of history in academia.

11. Murray and Sinnreich, The Past as Prologue, 2. See also Thucydides, 

History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (London: Penguin Books, 

1954), 48. Murray and Sinnreich quote from Thucydides, “those who want to 

understand clearly the events which happened in the past, and which (human 

nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be 

repeated in the future.” Thucydides’ understanding of human nature concluded that 

inevitably war would continually revisit man and civilization, and thus an accurate 

understanding of the past was an essential component to shaping the future.

12. Murray and Sinnreich, The Past as Prologue, 11. Murray and Sinnreich 

write that “In the end, like the phenomenon it studies, military historiography is 

a human enterprise, with human attributes and flaws.” A recent example of historical revisionism is the evaluation of U.S. Grant as both a military leader and 

US President, seen in Jean Edwards Smith book Grant, which attempts to revise 

the interpretation of the historical record on U.S. Grant, which was heavily influenced towards the negative by post-war southern historians.

13. Richard L. Davis, “The Case for Professional Military Education: A 

View From the Trenches,” Airpower Journal (Winter 1989). Davis highlights a 

critique of US Air Force PME in 1989, echoed today at the US Army Command 

and General Staff College, that instruction is “an inch deep and a mile wide.” 

Another common aphorism, based on the experience of the author is “wafer 

thin.” Essentially, the instruction is broad in scope but lacking in depth and 

understanding. This includes the instruction of military history.

14. Kiszely, “The Relevance of History to the Military Profession,” 27. 

Murray is speaking the British Army’s staff colleges, but it applies equally to the 

US Army’s staff college as well.

15. Department of the Army, FM 3-0, Operations, D-2.

16. BL010, Senior officer in the British Army, Interview by Mark Battjes, 

Nathan Springer, Dustin Mitchell, Rob Green, Aaron Kaufman, Rick Johnson, 

and Ben Boardman, Warminster, UK, 29 March 2011.
37

17. Peter R. Mansoor, Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander’s War in 

Iraq (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 107. Mansoor highlights the 

US Army’s institutional belief in Rapid Decisive Operations (RDO) following the 

first Gulf War, where organizational and technological superiority would reflect 

the way the Army fights in the future, despite an understanding that future war 

would be decentralized, chaotic, and uncertain. Brian McAllister Linn, The Echo 

of Battle: The Army’s Way of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 

2007), 226, 230. Linn writes about the profusion of buzzwords or new jargon 

that also influenced Army doctrinal development, such as mass effects, dominant 

maneuver, full dimensional protection, etc., all contingent upon information age 

technologies. H. R. McMaster, “Learning from Contemporary Conflicts to Prepare 

for Future War,” Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs 52, no. 4 (2008).

18. Robert A. Doughty, The Breaking Point: Sedan and the Fall of France, 

1940 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1990), 27-30. Doughty’s research and arguments clearly stake the claim in problems that doctrine can inflict on an army. 

However, he also lays out the thinking and context of French doctrinal reforms, 

which when analyzed do not appear extreme or poor in the contexts of the time.

19. Doughty, The Breaking Point, 29-30.

20. Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 6-22, Army Leadership: 

Competent, Confident, and Agile (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 

2006), 7-1. Forceful prose and speeches on the requirement for leaders that are 

adaptive, agile, competent, culturally astute, etc., do not necessarily lead to the 

creation of better leaders.

21. John A. Nagl, “Learning and Adapting to Win,” Joint Forces Quarterly, 

no. 58 (3d Quarter 2010), 123; Nicholas Lemann, “Social Scientists Do Counterinsurgency,” The Nation 86, no. 10 (April 2010), 73-77. Lemann compares and 

contrasts the arguments for and against population-centric COIN as advocated by 

some social scientists, as well as its counterargument by historian Mark Moyar.

22. Gian P. Gentile, “Let’s Build an Army to Win All Wars,” Joint Forces 

Quarterly, no. 52 (1st Quarter 2009), 27.

23. BL010, Interview. The military weakness was self-induced, due to a 

desire to get out of Iraq and the cognitive dissonance of not recognizing an 

insurgency when you see it, conflating crime with insurgency.

24. Department of the Army, FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, 1-20 through 

1-22. According to FM 3-24, the historical principles for COIN are: Legitimacy 

is the main objective, unity of effort is essential, political factors are primary, 

counterinsurgents must understand the environment, intelligence drives operations, insurgents must be isolated from their cause and support, security under 

the rule of law is essential, and counterinsurgents must prepare for a long-term 

commitment. The contemporary imperatives for COIN are manage information 

and expectations, use the appropriate level of force, learn and adapt, empower at the lowest levels, and support the host nation. The paradoxes of COIN 

operations are: sometimes if you protect your force, the less secure you may be; 

sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is; the more successful the 

counterinsurgency is, the less force can be used and the more risk must be ac-
38

cepted; sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction; some of the best weapons 

for counterinsurgents do not shoot; the host nation doing something tolerably 

is normally better than us doing it well; if a tactic works this week, it might not 

work well next week . . . it if works in this province, it might not work in the 

next; tactical success guarantees nothing; and many important decisions are not 

made by generals.

25. The original nine Principles of War as defined by Fuller were direction, 

offensive action, surprise, concentration, distribution, security, mobility, endurance, and determination. See J. F. C. Fuller, Foundations of the Science of War 

(London: Hutchinson & Co., 1926), 208.

26. Author’s opinion on the COIN principle of Unity of Effort is Essential. 

Combat units in Baghdad during the Surge achieved success in spite of lacking 

true Unity of Effort. Perhaps the best outcome possible was achieving Harmony 

of Effort, which implies that progress across time and space occurred without any 

synergizing or unifying effort from higher headquarters. This was also present in 

the efforts of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams and their relationships with tactical units conducting COIN in Baghdad. Additionally, the notion of achieving unity of effort while structurally impeding this principle through unit rotations every 

twelve months and constantly changing battlespace is implausible. Units achieved 

success even though we did not adhere to this principle. The oral histories in support of this thesis support this claim; Gian P. Gentile, “Time for the Deconstruction 

of FM 3-24” Joint Forces Quarterly, no. 58 (3d Quarter 2010), 117.

27. Opinion of the author. A good subject for research on the relationship 

between officer education and its effects on actual warfighting.

28. Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United 

States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 

1973), xxii.

29. Weigley, The American Way of War, xxii.

30. Weigley, The American Way of War, xxii.

31. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. by Michael Howard and 

Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 220.

32. Antulio J. Echevarria II, Toward an American Way of War (Carlisle, PA: 

Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 2004), 1.

33. Echevarria II, Toward an American Way of War, 7.

34. Echevarria II, Toward an American Way of War, 7.

35. BF010, Former Army Officer and Current Academic, Interview by 

Aaron Kaufman and Rick Johnson, Boston, MA, 11 March 2011. The interviewee discusses the triumphalist and magnanimous way that General Schwarzkopf 

approached the cease-fire negotiations at Safwan, Iraq, during Operation Desert 

Storm. The fight was over, and thus the main problem was solved and negotiations were of secondary importance. He argues that this thinking pervaded the 

military and political culture of the time after the fall of Baghdad in 2003.

36. The concept of Total War has roots in Clausewitz. Total War generally describes a lack of limits concerning the prosecution and objectives of the 

war, often associated with facing an enemy that presents an existential threat. 
39

In Total War, war aims are unlimited, the mobilization of human and material resources is total, and traditional immunity afforded to non-combatants is 

often denied, and the means used to prosecute the war are constrained only 

by resources. The objective with respect to the enemy is often total defeat or 

destruction of his ability to fight and complete subjugation of the enemy’s 

political will and authority. Terms such as ‘unconditional surrender’ are associated with Total War. World Wars I and II are both considered Total Wars. 

In Limited War, both the ends and means are often politically and militarily 

restrained. The objectives of war are often tied to gaining a favorable position 

in a negotiated settlement that ends hostilities. National resources in men and 

material are not mobilized in total, although Limited War can be very costly as 

seen in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Hypothetically, traditional rules and 

laws of armed conflict are followed more so than in Total War, and non-combatant immunity is respected.

37. Linn, The Echo of Battle, 7. Linn argues that the Army’s Way of War is 

dominated intellectually by three competing, but not mutually exclusive camps, 

including the Guardians, Managers, and Heroes. The Managers view war as a 

question of organization, versus the Guardians who view the war as an engineering problem. For the Managers, war is a question of the rational organization of 

men and material.

38. Clausewitz, On War, 140.

39. Baron Antoine de Jomini, The Art of War trans. by G. H. Mendell and 

W. P. Craighill (Rockville, MD: Arc Manor, 2007), 31, 41. Jomini claimed that 

war was a distinct science of its own, and that science has proved its utility 

and principles in all forms of ordinary, including human, affairs. His influence 

was noted in the 1862 US Army translation of his book, and persists today, 

particular in vocabulary and in the use of principles. In this case, principles are 

in essence conflated towards law, stemming from the intellectual efforts of the 

French Enlightenment to rationalize social and government systems towards 

natural law, as humans live in a natural world governed by laws characterized 

by Newtonian physics. Such efforts to rationalize human systems, to the use 

social engineering towards a better form of society government in conformity 

to natural law were refuted by the German Enlightenment and philosophers 

such as Kant and Hegel. Clausewitz recognized this, but projected it onto the 

realm of warfare.

40. The Infantry Journal Incorporated, Infantry in Battle (Richmond, VA: 

Garrett and Massie, 1939), vii.

41. Infantry in Battle, vii.

42. Clausewitz, On War, 148. Clausewitz differentiates between the art and 

science of war as the difference between the application of creative ability and 

the pursuit of knowledge, where the object of art is ability and the object of 

science is knowledge.

43. Timothy L. Challans, Awakening Warrior: Revolution in the Ethics of 

Warfare (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 162. Challans 

asserts that General Montgomery Meigs insertion of morale as a tenth Principle 
40

of War when he was the commander of CAC and in charge of doctrine was arbitrary and not in the intellectual vein that J.F.C. Fuller pursued when he posited 

the Nine Principles of War.

44. See endnote 20. Also aggravating the argument that COIN principles 

are not true principles is the misunderstanding of euphemisms such as hearts 

and minds, the people are the key as well as other emotive slogans used in 

Afghanistan, such as the one described as courageous restraint. Courageous 

restraint was used by British Army commanders in Helmand in 2009 as a reason 

in denying authority to use protective fires (indirect) in support of troops in 

contact. See BL150, Company Sergeant Major, Interview by Aaron Kaufman 

and Dustin Mitchell, 5 April 2011; BL200, Platoon Commander, Interview by 

Aaron Kaufman and Dustin Mitchell, 7 April 2011. This appeals to the COIN 

imperative of Use the Appropriate Level of Force as well as the COIN paradox 

of success in COIN means using less force and accepting more risk.

45. Nigel Aylwin-Foster, “Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency,” 

Military Review (November-December 2005), 6-7. Aylwin-Foster’s view of 

the US Army during his time in Iraq on MNC-I staff included terms such as 

process oriented, staff driven (instead of command driven), a commitment 

to unreasonable optimism which clouded frank and correct assessment, etc. 

Aylwin-Foster’s view of the US Army is probably widely held in the US Army 

officer corps.

46. Christopher R. Paparone and George Reed, “The Reflective Military 

Practitioner: How Military Professionals Think in Action,” Military Review 

(March-April 2008), 6-7. Paparone and Reed write that MDMP, instead of actually 

generating unique solutions or options for the commander, is instead perhaps 

better described as a myopic-decision making process. The implication is that the 

process and work behind it creates a false impression of intellectual rigor, when in 

fact it is an exercise in control, conformity, and adherence to mechanics.

47. Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 3-60, The Targeting Process (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, November 2010).

48. The Targeting Process, 1-1.

49. General James N. Mattis, USMC, “USJFCOM Commander’s Guidance 

for Effects-based Operations,” Joint Force Quarterly 51 (4th Quarter 2008), 

105-106; For a closer examination of the language in FM 3-60, see “Targeting 

Principles,” 1-2.

50. Mattis, “USJFCOM Commander’s Guidance for Effects-based Operations,” 105. Mattis argues that EBO/EBAO cannot predict or anticipate the actions 

of complex human systems because it essentially cannot describe the human 

system because it fails to account for free will, passions, relationships, etc.

51. For a philosophical and academic argument against EBO/EBAO, see 

Tim Challans, “Tipping Sacred Cows: Moral Potential Through Operational 

Art,” Military Review (September-October 2009), 19-28.

52. The primary proponent for FM 3-60 is the Fires Center of Excellence, located 

at Fort Sill, OK, which is also the home of the Field Artillery. The Field Artillery 

branch is arguably the Army branch most oriented on the technical aspects of combat.
41

53. This paragraph is the author’s opinion based on experience. Small unit 

maneuver doctrine, from the company-level and below, is extremely useful and 

necessary for building competent and capable teams. It provides a sound base of 

competency regarding the use of force, which is easily manipulated by well-led 

units. Deviating significantly from developing these tactical skills undermines 

the basic small unit competencies necessary to build confident and capable fighting organizations. Combat arms units, well trained in core competencies and 

led by good officers, often use force far more judiciously in COIN that in units 

where leaders are not trained regularly in controlling force. This is often referred 

to as getting the fundamentals right.

54. Clausewitz, On War, 140.

55. Cliff Rogers, “Clausewitz, Genius, and the Rules” The Journal of Military History 66 (October 2002), 1167.

56. Clausewitz, On War, 141.

57. Clausewitz, On War, 141.

58. James D. Sisemore, The Russo Japanese War: Lessons Not Learned 

(Fort Leavenworth, KS: US Army Command and General Staff College, 2003), 

1. See also Robert A. Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap 

Press of the Harvard University Press, 2005), 25-28. Doughty describes the roles 

of senior French Army officers, such as Joffre, in the promulgation of the idea of 

offensive à outrance and its influence on doctrine.

59. Paul H. Herbert, “Deciding What Has to Be Done: General William E. 

DePuy and the 1976 Edition of FM 100-5, Operations,” Leavenworth Papers 16 

(Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, August 1979), 1.

60. Herbert, “Deciding What Has to Be Done,” 54.

61. Donn A. Starry, “Interview by LTC Matthias A. Spruill and LTC Edwin 

T. Vernon,” in Press On! The Selected Works of General Donn A. Starry, ed. 

Lewis Sorley (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2009), 

1004, 1018-1019, 1020.

62. Herbert, “Deciding What Has to Be Done,” 54.

63. Roger J. Spiller, “In the Shadow of the Dragon: Doctrine and the US 

Army after Vietnam,” The RUSI Journal (December 1997), 45.

64. Herbert, “Deciding What Has to Be Done,” 59.

65. Herbert, “Deciding What Has to Be Done,” 51.

66. Herbert, “Deciding What Has to Be Done,” 54.

67. Herbert, “Deciding What Has to Be Done,” 55. In Cushman’s view, 

the only requirement of doctrine was to succeed in combat. Cushman and CAC 

quickly became marginalized—at least with respect to the writing of operational doctrine—within the new TRADOC, particularly after DePuy rejected 

the draft operations manual CAC submitted for review. Solidifying the role 

of doctrine required the operational force to adopt and implement the new 

doctrine and approach to training. DePuy and his deputies conducted numerous visits to operational units and hosted conferences that gave the appearance 

of dialogue, where commanders could offer critiques and improvements to the 

nascent doctrine.
42

68. Herbert, “Deciding What Has to Be Done,” 42. General Donn Starry 

and the Armor Center retained the authority for writing armor, cavalry, and 

mechanized doctrine under DePuy.

69. Herbert, “Deciding What Has to Be Done,” 54.

70. Herbert, “Deciding What Has to Be Done,” 54.

71. John H. Cushman, Fort Leavenworth: A Memoir (Fort Leavenworth, 

KS: Government Printing Office, 2001).

72. Herbert, “Deciding What Has to Be Done,” 55. Descriptive doctrine 

places the burden of understanding the beyond the pages of doctrine directly on 

the officer corps. Doctrine as a unification of ideas for how military units train, 

fight, organize, and equip is essential, but it is not sufficient on its own as a source 

of officer education. The role of descriptive doctrine is to correctly orient thought 

towards a right path that allows for an infinite combination and variety of events 

that exist in the real world. Ambiguities, inconsistencies, and uncertainties within 

the doctrine are a permanent and unavoidable. Sorting through the problems of 

doctrine, as Cushman would say, requires thought in application. Clearly, Cushman’s view retains a more optimistic bent towards the capabilities of individual 

officers, but in the context of the time of the DePuy-Cushman conflict, Cushman’s 

perspective assumed a more general ability of high performance regarding Army 

field grade officers. DePuy believed the opposite, and in any case, the risk of 

destruction at the hands of the Soviets in the first battle precluded an approach to 

education that did not create capable field grade staff officers. If war came, an onthe-job learning approach to staff work and command meant destruction.

73. Department of the Army, FM 3-0, Operations, 7-5.

74. Herbert, “Deciding What Has to Be Done,” 58-59. DePuy’s remarks 

give the appearance that a prescriptive doctrine is not possible, that all possible 

contingencies cannot be planned for. DePuy further appeals to logic, coherence, 

simplicity, directness, assertiveness, and clarity when describing the new manual. Doctrine is an instrument of teaching, and those with the most experience 

in war and peace ought to do the teaching. Some of his words seem to appeal 

to uncertainty and unforeseen contingencies, but the tone of writing and his 

requirements for logic, clarity, and assertiveness in doctrine serve to minimize 

the importance of contingencies. In this sort of teaching environment, doctrine 

is the instrumental means towards better staffs and units in combat. Also, a main 

concern of doctrine-centric education is the risk of creating doctrinaire thinkers. 

Doctrinal approaches and fixation considered over time can foreshadow how the 

Army selects officers for positions of command, particularly in peacetime. If the 

doctrine is prescriptive, and officers are evaluated on their ability to implement 

doctrine in training, then the system develops to support and perpetuate doctrinaire thinking. Likeminded leaders will promote the same type of leaders, supported by an underlying military bureaucracy that sees good officers abstractly 

through the prism of success in key positions which are also evaluated through 

a doctrinal lens. Do certain things well, and the institution rewards you with 

promotion and command. Significant deviation from this career path may result 

in risk to both promotion and selection for command. Officers are thus mainly 
43

required to perform well in the world as shaped through doctrine. Doctrine-centric education and training performance evaluations that measure performance 

against doctrine, particularly large unit operational doctrine, is perhaps better 

described as training and indoctrination, rather than education. It can prove both 

institutionally and intellectually restraining.

75. See also Linn, The Echo of Battle, 193-233. Linn argues in this chapter 

that doctrinal revolution firmly invested and entrenched the Army’s doctrine 

on large, conventional notions of land warfare, and that intellectual endeavors 

such as the development of the School of Advanced Military Studies simply 

expanded the depth at which the Army studied the history of battle and maneuver in the form of conventional warfare.

76. Anne W. Chapman, “The Army’s Training Revolution 1973-1990: 

An Overview,” (TRADOC Historical Study Series, Office of the Command 

Historian, 1991), 9.

77. Herbert, “Deciding What Has to Be Done,” 39.

78. BF010, Interview.

79. BF010, Interview.

80. Starry, “Interview by LTC Matthias A. Spruill and LTC Edwin T. 

Vernon,” 1111. Starry stated that “I don’t think Jack Cushman had the same 

perception of the battlefield as we did. I cannot talk for him. Jack Cushman is a 

very smart guy, and I have great admiration for his intellectual ability. But he is 

not a very practical person. He fundamentally believes that he knows more about 

almost any subject you want to talk about than anybody else. He came to see me 

at Fort Knox shortly after I got there, because Leavenworth was supposed to be 

some kind of a coordinating headquarters over the combat arms schools. He said 

he wanted to come and see what we were doing. He came and I was prepared with 

briefings to talk with him and show him what we were doing. He talked for three 

days. He talked for three days; I listened and quickly determined, within a couple 

of hours on the first day, that he didn’t want to hear what we were doing at Fort 

Knox at all. He wanted to talk; he wanted to show me how smart he was about 

all these things. The more he talked, the more I realized that he and I were not in 

any sort of agreement about anything—tactics, organization, doctrine, anything.” 

Cushman marginalized himself with the TRADOC elite.

81. Doughty’s book sets a high standard for research when conducting 

research on the causes of defeat in war, particular on an argument that claims a 

doctrinal deterministic cause of defeat.

45

CHAPTER 3

OPERATIONAL ART IN COUNTERINSURGENCY

Operational Art in US Army Doctrine and in COIN

The recently superseded Army FM 3-0 (Operations) defined operational art as the application of creative imagination by commanders and 

staffs—supported by their skill, knowledge, and experience—to design 

strategies, campaigns, and major operations and organize and employ military forces. Operational art integrates ends, ways, and means across the 

levels of war.1

More recently, Army Doctrinal Publication (ADP) 3-0, titled Unified 

Land Operations, defines operational art as the pursuit of strategic objectives, in whole or in part, through the arrangement of tactical actions 

in time, space, and purpose.2 Operational art encapsulates the role of 

the commander in balancing risk and opportunity to create and maintain 

conditions necessary to seize, retain, and exploit the initiative and gain 

a position of relative advantage while linking tactical actions to reach a 

strategic objective.3

ADP 3-0 further states that operational art is not associated with a 

specific echelon or formation, nor is it exclusive to theater and joint force 

commanders. Instead, it applies to any formation that must effectively arrange multiple, tactical actions in time, space, and purpose to achieve a 

strategic objective, in whole or in part. Instead, the necessity of operational 

art falls to the command echelon that must think operationally in order to 

accomplish its mission, whether tasked directly or derived implicitly from 

an ambiguous task.4 The ADP definition and explanation fits well within 

the security environment that defined OIF, where tactical commanders—

company commanders on up—faced an environment in Iraq that required 

operational art and thinking in order to seize the initiative locally towards 

the broader purposes of strategy. Commanders that led learning organizations in combat inherently used the latent potential for operational art that 

they either created or nurtured within their commands.

The method of command and control that commanders and staffs use 

in pursuit of operational art is known as mission command. Mission command is defined as the conduct of military operations through decentralized execution based on mission orders for effective mission accomplishment. Successful mission command results from subordinate leaders at all 

echelons exercising disciplined initiative within the commander’s intent to 

accomplish missions. It requires an environment of trust and mutual un-
46

derstanding.5 More subtly, perhaps, mission command implies a particular 

type of command climate and command leadership. Disciplined initiative 

in mission command inherently recognizes the limits of control in war, of 

the autonomy of subordinate commanders making decisions in lieu of directive guidance based on the inability of any military organization to gain 

perfect knowledge or impose total control. Disciplined initiative is essential in any learning organizations that must constantly adapt and innovate 

as the situation and environment requires. Disciplined initiative requires 

commanders that foster the same, are self-aware, intellectually humble, 

and open to the ideas and opinions of their peers and subordinates.

Army FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency does not refer to operational art 

specifically in the context of counterinsurgency, but does so indirectly 

through the use of common terminology, particularly regarding the design 

of campaigns, and the emphasis on placed on unity of effort and unity of 

command.6 Operational art in COIN is thus the equivalent of the creation, 

implementation, reevaluation, and adjustment of strategy, campaigns, major and minor engagements or operations in the COIN environment over 

time. Commanders establish control over the conduct of the campaign and 

operations through mission command, with subordinate commanders retaining broad authorities within their own operating environment.

Operational art in COIN is, however, more than the creation and control of campaigns. Counterintuitively, the idea of control and its common 

understanding in military hierarchy is often discordant with the practicable reality within the COIN environment. Put simply, the military commander’s ability to leverage control over what occurs within his area of 

responsibility is far less than doctrine entertains when highlighting such 

principles as unity of effort, where some authority is unifying and synchronizing the work of various organizations towards a common purpose.7

 This 

fails to recognize that external variables, not internal ones, are dominant in 

the COIN environment, where external variables are often outside of the 

immediate understanding of the commander and the knowledge of such 

variables often remains hidden and unknown.8 Traditional advantages in 

firepower and maneuver capability do not inherently provide advantages towards controlling the environment. In essence, we think we control 

more than we can, and we think we know far more than we do.

According to Army COIN doctrine, the requirement to think operationally along lines of effort and operations—to develop and implement 

a campaign plan—is often required of or delegated to the battalion level.9

In order to get subordinate units to think holistically about problems in the 

COIN environment, abstract and complex problem solving, deconstructed 
47

and broken down linearly into campaign objectives, lines of operations, 

end states, and decisive points, are required of organizations that lack the 

staff capacity to analyze in detail. Brigades, and in particular battalions 

and companies, while positioned physically closer to the reality of the 

COIN environment, are less equipped in technology and manpower to address the complex and abstract problems at the staff level. The campaign 

plan, however, is only one tool, and less an absolute requirement than 

simply a method for codifying operational thinking.

The downward pressure to think and plan operationally in fact represents 

a general lack of positive control and understanding of the environment, at 

least through lens of the traditionally organized staff and headquarters.10 It 

may represent, prima facie, a partial vacating of the traditional hierarchical control in the form of nesting of missions, concepts, purposes, and end 

states that doctrine often requires.11 Similarly, campaign plans must nest 

with the campaign plan of higher headquarters. When analyzed from the 

outside, however, the entire idea of the positive execution of a military campaign—in a place such as Iraq in OIF—must center on operational art and its 

potential in small units, and not on ideas of hierarchical control emanating 

from a campaign plan and its logical rigor. Indeed, subordinate commanders 

may demonstrate to their commander they understand the campaign and 

can execute it, through traditional back briefs or confirmation briefs. The 

commander can demonstrate that his plan is nested in the higher campaign, 

at least abstractly, that assigned tasks are nested, and thus usefully project an 

artificial image of hierarchical control. In execution, however, the subordinate commander and unit may perceive little or no control from higher headquarters concerning the execution of missions and operations in the COIN 

environment despite the nesting of purposes.12

Asserting centralized control of subordinate operations to provide a veneer of hierarchical logic and cohesion in executing operations is likely an 

exercise in futility. Doctrinal, top-down, staff driven efforts to assert control 

reflected in burdensome reporting requirements - particularly in the COIN 

environment - undermine subordinate command initiative. The logic of 

combat operations becomes a centralized narrative imposed by higher headquarters, rather than one reflective of local conditions. Unfortunately, commanders trained and educated in combat scenarios where operational logic 

is imposed from higher may find themselves intellectually ill-equipped to 

deal with the problems as they exist on the ground. The US Army has faced 

similar charges regarding its abilities as manifest in Iraq from 2003-2005.13

Assessing the operational environment on a regular basis to drive 

change, adaptation, and seize the initiative from the enemy burdens ev-
48

ery headquarters and staff attempting to assert influence or partial control 

of the operational environment. Achieving positive change at higher levels of command—through orders and directives—requires assessments, 

which are often the product of large amounts of data collection. As such, 

assessments are a requirement that FM 3-24 acknowledges and details, 

described in two general approaches. The first approach is described as 

intuitive and subjective, and it shaped through continual learning, understanding, and experience.14 The second approach is ostensibly objective, 

and centers on the collection of specific data and empirical facts that drive 

analysis and objective assessment, often with the use of particular heuristics such as PMESII-PT.15 The data or metrics-oriented approach to assessment applies particularly to military staffs, as staff officers may lack any 

subjective experience that shapes intuitive assessment. Both approaches 

generate internal tension, but intuitive assessment actually requires extensive personal experience and deep understanding as well as a feel for the 

quality of information. Assessment from data collection, which is ostensibly inductive, are nevertheless arbitrary assessments driven or created for 

modeling tools, or heuristics, that in turn shape the reporting requirements 

for metrics generation at lower echelons.16

The COIN operational environment as seen in recent wars, through 

forcing smaller and tactically-oriented military organizations into the requirement of thinking operationally, highlights the problems that traditional military hierarchical command and control structures may face when 

trying to understand and change the environment. It may also prove that 

traditional planning tools and heuristics are unsatisfactory in describing 

the operational environment, or organizing and allocating forces towards 

seizing the initiative, as well as anticipating contingency.17

Ultimately, the problems of traditional staff structures in particular 

environments do not portend organizational failure in COIN. Nor does it 

mean that conventionally organized military forces cannot effectively conduct COIN. Traditional military capabilities—those military units organized and trained traditionally and hierarchically—are often very capable 

organizationally in fighting insurgency.18 The limiting factor is the quality 

of command intellect and leadership. Commanders of conventional combat organizations, although perhaps specialized in experience as young 

officers, must at some point become generalists in thinking on warfare, 

either through experience or education. The US Army’s experience in Iraq 

and Afghanistan has demonstrated the necessity of thinking operationally, 

as a generalist, for those that command forces owning terrain and directly 

tasked with defeating a lethal foe. This requirement is often manifested at 
49

the company-level and above. Becoming a generalist for war, however, 

is not something that occurs from experience and reading a few books. 

No, true generalists emerge from years of the study of military history, 

understanding campaigns in depth as well as warfare in its various forms. 

Generalists in war are generalists because of experience and education, 

and not because of position; they retain particular in-depth knowledge of 

a broad variety of warfare.

There is perhaps no better example of a generalist with particular, indepth knowledge of COIN than General Sir Frank Kitson, on the retired 

list in the British Army. Most famously, Kitson wrote extensively on COIN 

theory when it was a popular subject in military affairs in the 1950s, 60s, and 

70s. Perhaps lesser known is Kitson’s extensive writing about conventional 

war in the 1980s, including Directing Operations and Warfare as a Whole

which cement his place as a generalist of war and warfare. His writings 

are particularly useful for officers that command combat arms formations, 

and instructive as to the path of development officers must take to become 

effective commanders. His writings consist of a descriptive synthesis and 

expression of education and experience, of reflection and learning towards 

better practice, of the necessity for practitioners of warfare to understand 

warfare in all its forms. The requirement to understand necessitates generalists instead of single form of warfare experts or commanders.

To the extent that Kitson is a generalist, he was also a specialist when 

it came to explaining theorizing on certain types of warfare, namely 

COIN. History and experience combine in Kitson and are expressed in 

theory. Seeing how a generalist such as Kitson expresses his particular 

theory concerning COIN is useful for the purposes of professional military 

education, on how the practitioner and student of military history can turn 

educator in military affairs and war.19

General Sir Frank Kitson on Theory and Practice: A Synopsis

General Sir Frank Kitson is perhaps the least dogmatic and most practical of all of the COIN theorists. This lack of prescriptive theory is neither a 

rejection of general themes in COIN, nor the offspring of oversimplification 

or a lack of detail. Indeed, Kitson is very descriptive on the conditions and 

capabilities required to fight successfully in the COIN environment. Avoiding attempts to create overreaching theoretical models indirectly recognizes 

the local nature and uniqueness of all insurgencies and the ability of war to 

impose itself at the expense of any theory, and thus tends to insulate Kitson’s 

ideas from charges of irrelevance.20 In essence, Kitson’s ideas are more accommodating versus exclusionary to various types of low-intensity warfare.
50

Kitson’s two major works on counterinsurgency, Bunch of Five and 

Low Intensity Operations, are products of Kitson’s historical experiences 

in the COIN environment combined with insight born of years of reflection. Kitson was commissioned in 1946 in the British Army and served 

in Germany until the start of the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, where he 

would serve initially to augment the police Special Branch.21 He would go 

on to serve in Malaya, Oman, Cyprus, and Northern Ireland.

Kitson characterizes wars of insurgency as wars for the minds of 

men.22 He also describes the relationship between violence and ideas in 

insurgency, where violence is in support of ideas and propaganda.23 In 

conventional wars he asserts the opposite is true.24 He defines insurgency 

as the rising in active revolt against the constitutional authority of a country.25 Subversion, preceding and also running concurrent to insurgency, 

seeks the overthrow and destruction of this political and legal authority.26

Thus, the framework for military intervention to defeat insurgency and 

subversion is based legally on and in support of the rule of law.

27

The fundamental requirement for any insurgency is a cause, whether 

existing or fabricated, that retains significant popular appeal.28 Without 

one, an insurgency will lack a clear psychological source of unity and will 

thus fail, just as the foco method of insurgency promoted by Che Guevara failed to generate a sufficient cause in Bolivia.29 The cause serves to 

ameliorate the initial weaknesses of the insurgent in material and military 

capability through the protection of the insurgent infrastructure and base.

The efforts to conduct subversion and insurgency, as well as the counter 

efforts, are described as campaigns.30 The major influence on the form of the 

campaigns is shaped not through the nature of the enemy, but the nature of 

the terrain.31 In the first campaign form, where a country possesses significant amounts of mountainous and forested terrain, the insurgents will use 

the mountains and the forest to protect and sustain the revolutionary army.32

Additionally, the advantageous terrain may afford the revolutionary force 

the ability to directly engage the military formations of the government.33

The second campaign form lacks the terrain described in the first campaign form. In the second campaign form, the insurgency exists within a 

combination of urban, semi-urban, and settled rural terrain.34 The revolutionary forces cannot mass into larger military formations, and thus rely on 

economic and political attrition through the use of propaganda, sabotage, 

and low-level violence, including terrorism.35 No base area exists that is 

inaccessible to the counterinsurgent force. The third campaign form is a 

hybrid of the first two.36 In all campaign forms, the existence of a transna-
51

tional ideology is far less important than the nature of the terrain in determining the organization and tactics of the insurgent force.

Kitson on Operational Art in COIN: The Four Requirements 

of a Campaign

The campaign to counter insurgency and subversion is known as the 

framework.37 Within this framework, Kitson describes four critical requirements for a workable campaign: coordinating machinery, establishing the 

right political atmosphere, intelligence, and the law.38 The framework and 

requirements must remain flexible, and require constant evaluation, assessment, and adaptation.39

The coordinating machinery provides the leadership for the execution of the COIN campaign. The leadership structure is based on political 

authority and the law, and within the British tradition is known as the 

committee system. Fundamentally the committee is combined civil-military command structure, and is shaped to the particular contexts of the 

specific campaign. In Malaya, the leadership was delegated through the 

High Commissioner in the Federal War Council to the State Executive War 

Committees (SWEC) and District Executive War Committees (DWEC). 

At all levels, the DWECs and SWECs involved significant civil-military 

coordination and decision-making. In Oman, where the British military 

supported the sultanate with limited forces and seconded officers, the British leveraged a different, far less robust apparatus to coordinate civil-military operations, known as the Civil Action Team (CAT). In both cases, 

and in other examples, the coordinating machinery was constructed and 

adapted from the foundation of existing political authority and infrastructure with military organizations and leadership added to affect symbiosis. 

According to Kitson, the major problem in achieving symbiosis centers 

on power and authority, which often requires paying a significant price in 

political, economical, and personal authority.40

The second requirement of a workable campaign is establishing the 

right political atmosphere within which the government can introduce 

measures designed to counter the subversive and insurgent threat with a 

high probability of success.41 The government starts with an initial disadvantage due to the hostile political atmosphere and negative public opinion created by the insurgents.42 Propaganda remains a critical tool for both 

the insurgent and counterinsurgent. Kitson also writes that propaganda 

must also target the insurgent external lines of support.43 In the modern 

context, Kitson is referring to information operations (IO) and psychological operations (PSYOP).
52

Additionally, Kitson argues that policy decisions made to address the 

insurgency always have unavoidable effects on human beliefs and opinions, regardless of the intent of the decisions.44 Due to this unavoidable 

effect that emerges from government policy as well as individual soldier 

conduct on the street, COIN campaigns must always consider and attempt 

to anticipate the reaction of the population as a consideration in planning.45

Kitson also recognizes the difficulty of the government in pursuing 

simultaneously IO and PSYOP. In IO, the government seeks to keep the 

public informed as rapidly and accurately as possible. In PSYOP, or propaganda, the government is seeking both a change in belief and a change 

in behavior, and may manipulate information to achieve this effect. The 

abuse or misuse of PSYOP can taint the IO efforts.46

While it may be possible for some military leaders to avoid certain 

areas of IO when conducting a COIN campaign, senior military leaders 

cannot avoid the necessity of IO, including when it requires shaping international and domestic political opinion. The testimony provided by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker to a joint session of 

the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees in September 

2007 provides a clear example of Kitson’s second requirement at work.47

Petraeus and Crocker, through careful testimony and the avoidance of traps 

and polemics, essentially sold the extension of the Iraq War to Congress 

and the American people, thus generating the political will and support 

to provide space for the strategy to work. This is particularly remarkable 

considering the political atmosphere of the time in Washington, DC.

The third pillar in the framework is intelligence. Kitson’s emphasis 

on intelligence is a common theme amongst COIN theorists. In Kitson’s 

view, domestic intelligence apparatuses are insufficient in organization 

to deal with the threat of insurgency as they are overly centralized and 

managed, and do not produce the information required in the form of operational intelligence to enable the military to target the insurgency effectively.48 Similar to the creation of the coordinating machinery, reorganizing intelligence organizations for COIN is difficult and politically risky.49

Decentralization and expansion of intelligence systems imports risk into 

the equation, but it is perhaps the only way to rapidly generate operational 

intelligence in support of the COIN effort.50 As organizations function autonomously in COIN, any autonomous element, even down to the company level, must retain an expansive intelligence collection capability. Thus, 

in order to think operationally—to exploit a latent potential in operational 

art—commanders must gain continuous useful intelligence on the enemy 

and the environment.
53

Operating within the law and demonstrating a concern for legality define the fourth requirement for an effective framework.51 The conditions 

and liberties of a free society can serve to enable and protect the insurgent 

organization.52 Laws and procedures may require amending and temporary modification to equip the government and security forces with the 

tools necessary to dismantle insurgent infrastructure and defeat the insurgency.53 The government, regardless of the political risk, cannot afford 

to protect all the liberties and benefits of a democratic society at the expense of its constitutional duty to protect the integrity of the state and the 

people.54 Operational art in COIN thus requires commanders and units to 

innovate and adapt to legal constraints in order to effectively use combat 

power to seize and maintain the initiative.

The framework is straightforward in principle, but difficult to implement 

in practice. The localized nature of insurgencies and the particular considerations imposed by the terrain and the enemy requires decentralization of 

authority down to the lowest levels of military organization. The framework, 

or campaign, is simultaneously centralized in concept but decentralized in 

application. If the framework is overly centralized, whether via directive 

or organizational culture, it risks ceding the initiative to the insurgency and 

thus extending the campaign in time to a point of political exhaustion and 

the attrition of will. If too decentralized or inconsistent in application across 

unit boundaries and transitions, if commanders and units lack latent potential in operational art, the framework risks losing harmony of effort and operational momentum critical to defeating subversion and insurgency. In both 

cases the results are beneficial to the insurgency.55

Kitson on the Essential Capability in COIN and War in General

Officer leadership provides the essential means towards bridging the 

gap between pursuit of strategic objectives as described in the framework 

and the operational and tactical means used. The commanding officer 

serves as the medium through which ideas are generated, reflected upon, 

adapted, and reapplied. When organizational conditions are favorable for 

success in the COIN environment—when offensive means are available 

and the restraints of higher echelons of command are not too burdensome—then it is often the quality of the command leadership that creates the favorable conditions for mission success.56 In the modern context 

concerning military organization fighting in COIN, the most determinant 

quality includes the latent potential for operational art within commanders 

in the field. This quality combines pure operational capability combined 

with an operational approach—a campaign—adequate towards the ends of 

strategy. In essence, Kitson is making a claim that command leadership in 
54

COIN in its purest form is expressed in the application of operational art. 

One could, however, make this claim about war in general, and not simply COIN. But, the implications of combining Kitson’s thinking with the 

particular and local nature of COIN environments means that operational 

art is also required in smaller units more traditionally aligned with tactics.

This requirement for operational art in small units tacitly acknowledges the limitations of the senior military and political leadership to 

effectively leverage control over the execution of the COIN campaign at 

the local level, regardless of the trends in historiography to assign success to leaders such as Templer and Petraeus.57 The inherent limitations 

of both understanding and control in decentralized execution places a 

tremendous burden on subordinate leaders, and thus the necessity for 

operational art and thinking. The hand of hierarchical control and authority may prove so light as to seem virtually non-existent, and thus 

necessitates trust in the ability of those leaders to operate independently 

of continual oversight. The development of military officers, particularly 

future commanders, preparing them to operate in such an environment is 

the essential capability for pursuing campaign objectives in COIN, and 

perhaps in all war.58

Kitson’s experience as an army officer demonstrates the essential role 

of the military officer in implementing COIN strategy, in thinking and 

acting operationally, and he writes extensively on developing the officer 

corps and units through education and training. In Bunch of Five Kitson 

writes that the requirement for military commanders to understand and 

execute COIN is absolute, as it ultimately centers on fighting.

But when the fighting starts the soldier will not only be expected to 

know how to conduct operations, he may also have to advise on other government measures as well. We have seen that it is only by a close combination of civil and military measures that an insurgency can be fought, so it is 

logical to expect soldiers whose business it is to know how to fight, to also 

to know how to use civil measures in this way. Not only should the army 

officers know about the subject, they must also be prepared to pass on their 

knowledge to politicians, civil servants, economists, members of the local 

government, and policemen where necessary. The educational function of 

the army at these critical moments is the most important. Amongst senior 

officers in particular, ignorance or excessive diffidence in passing along 

such knowledge on can be disastrous.59

Kitson argues that military commanders must retain a detailed understanding of the nature of fighting in the COIN environment, of the domi-
55

nating contexts.60 He also argues that in his time the British Army assumed 

that officers trained and educated in one form of warfare are suitable for 

command in another form of warfare.61 In essence, the narrowness of 

training, education, and experience were not seen as inherently negative 

in selecting officers for command. Such a method of selection, of determining an officer’s suitability for command, is not unlike the current US 

Army’s method, where successful service in any developmental position, 

regardless of the scope of the job or relevance to the next assignment, is 

the determinant factor in selection for command. Relevant experience is 

ultimately required in the effort to collect knowledge, due to the limits of 

theoretical knowledge and the requirement for refinement to shape intuition and hone decision-making skills.62

The education and training requirements for officers and units preparing 

for fighting in the COIN environment contains four separate aspects. The 

first aspect is the requirement to fundamentally understand the nature of 

insurgency and subversion, as well as gain significant knowledge and insight of the particular mission and enemy facing a unit preparing to conduct 

COIN operations.63 The burden to educate the officers falls on the army, 

wherein the soldiers are the beneficiaries of good officer education.64 Studying campaigns of insurgency in military history is the basis for knowledge.65

Thus, building an able force requires officers historically educated in the 

study of campaigns in military history. As officers gain experience in particular campaigns, education serves as a reference point for reflection. All 

other things being equal, the quality of education of the commanders will 

indelibly shape the learning habits of organizations in combat.

The second aspect of education is developing and educating officers 

to plan and execute a COIN campaign using a combination of civil and 

military measures to achieve a single government aim, to generating a 

harmony of effort along multiple lines of operation.66 This is more than developing lines of operations and strategy flow charts. Commanders require 

a highly tuned reasoning ability, sensitive intuition, and a sophisticated 

understanding of all the tactics, resources, and means available towards 

generating complementary effects.

Additionally, commanders must understand the temporal and mission 

effects regarding the use of certain means or tactics. As COIN is inherently 

local, the use of particular tactics in one area does not mean that the same 

tactics will achieve the same success in another area. The unreflective and 

inconsiderate poaching of tactics or methods in COIN can significantly increase the risk to the overall campaign, particularly if those tactics involve 

significant violence and physical coercion.67
56

The third aspect is teaching officers and future commanders how to 

direct or allocate their forces within the COIN fight, or in other words, 

how to effectively apply military means against this complex problem.68

Achieving tactical objectives in COIN hinge on the ability of the commander to effectively collect, analyze, and assess information and intelligence in order to drive operations, to remain physically and cognitively 

engaged with the operating environment to gain and retain the initiative.69

Kitson argued that while significant materials existed regarding various 

approaches to this problem, a gap existed in describing the tactical framework required for the use of certain techniques.70 It is arguable that this 

gap is persistent and overarching, as it essentially involves small unit commanders executing operational art. It also recognizes, de facto, the limitations of the control mechanisms inherent in military organizations, as 

successful prosecution of COIN strategy is almost always decentralized. 

Commanders, when faced with complex operational environments and 

problems will always be forced to adapt existing organizational structures 

as required. Kitson’s limited writing on the third aspect is simply reflects 

the fact that it may not be possible to distill a theory adequate to the task of 

creating an overarching and universal operational concept for countering 

insurgency. Thus, there are simply no indispensible or universal tactics, 

techniques, or organizational structures in COIN.

The fourth aspect of training and education involves the teaching 

and application of particular tactics and techniques.71 Kitson views this 

problem as relatively straightforward in that plenty of materials exist to 

address this problem in a comprehensive manner.72 Thus, while adapting 

tactical doctrine is necessary and continuous, it should also be relatively 

easy. Learning and adapting is a function of daily interaction with the environment and the enemy and remain cognitively engaged in the fight. The 

issue then becomes ensuring that the training is relevant and realistic to the 

conflict environment.73 The British Army retained significant experience 

in the mid-twentieth century that reflects Kitson’s fourth aspect. The establishment of the Jungle Warfare School in Kota Tinggi, Malaya, in 1949 

serves as one example. More recently, the British Army’s Northern Ireland 

Training and Advisory Team (NITAT) provided another example. In both 

cases, training for deploying army units was highly particularized for local 

conditions and led by training cadres with extensive experience in theater.

Kitson argues that officer education on the subjects of insurgency and 

subversion requires career-long instruction as a formal part of professional military education, taught progressively depending on rank and experience.74 Kitson emphasizes that subversion and insurgency must not be 
57

taught or treated as specialized fields where relatively few officers benefit 

from focused education.75 He elaborates further:

Fighting subversion or insurgency is no more of a special subject 

than is the fighting of conventional war. It is all part of the same 

subject, i.e. fighting, and the only rational way of approaching the 

problem is to teach it as a perfectly normal phase of war. Thus, 

aspects relevant to cadet schools such as Sandhurst, and aspects 

relevant to staff officers and unit commanders must be taught as 

Staff Colleges such as those at Camberley and Latimer.76

Thus, as a part of military history, campaigns in countering insurgency and subversion must be taught continuously. Kitson 

then provides general recommendations regarding the type of 

education and training officers ought to receive when attending 

army schools, from cadet schools to senior staff colleges. The 

instruction of campaign development, on thinking operationally and on operational art in the COIN environment, is pushed 

down to the company commander level.77

Kitson avoids the either-or debate concerning the allocation of training 

time to COIN and conventional war tasks.78 Immediate necessity and constraining political and military contexts will ultimately drive organization and 

training requirements, and training tasks associated with COIN are invariably 

particular and subject to the same constraints and contexts. At this point, education—particularly the education of officers and future commanders—parts 

ways from the immediate necessity of organizing and training units in preparation for particular forms of warfare. Where training and organizing focuses 

on the particular, education in military history broadens to emphasize the general through in-depth study and reflection on experience. For the future commander, the former is ultimately subordinate to the latter, as the commander 

can control the particular application of force, but cannot control the contexts 

that ultimately shape when, where, and how force will be used in general.

The education of future commanders is thus of critical importance, 

with its object not being the creation of units capable of fighting COIN, 

but the development of effective commanders and an officer corps capable 

of carrying out their duties and responsibilities in the COIN fight.79 Thus 

educated, the officer corps is capable of shaping unit-level training and education in preparation for deployment in support of COIN, or other forms 

of warfare, regardless of the limits of time and resources.

Kitson also writes that senior commanders require more instruction in 

the planning and execution of COIN campaigns. Traditionally, however, 
58

the British Army’s senior staff colleges focused less time on the planning 

and conduct of COIN campaigns than more junior schools.80 Compounding this problem was the ability to objectively evaluate the performance of 

officers and commanders in the COIN environment.81 It is certainly more 

difficult as rank and responsibilities increase, but Kitson believes that such 

an evaluation would demonstrate that senior leaders and commanders require more instruction in campaign development and the critical requirements of continuity over time and harmony of effort.82

Experience and education must serve to augment and enhance the 

other. Small unit commanders, e.g. company-level and below, inherently gain more tactical experience in COIN than more senior commanders due to the nature of the COIN fight. The relationship between 

authority and direct experience is thus inversely proportional; the junior leader has or gains more concrete experience, but retains less authority, whereas the senior leader has less concrete tactical experience 

and but retains more authority.

This mismatch of experience and authority can challenge commanders with no experience countering insurgency. Thus, during the initial 

years of a COIN campaign, this paradigm can impose significant risks 

to harmony of effort. Cognitive isolation born of fighting in unfamiliar 

ways with vague tasks may prove ameliorable only through the passage 

of time, where experience hones inherent competence, enabling an officer to learn and think operationally. Commanders uncomfortable with 

their inferior position in experience may react in ways that while not directly damaging to the overall COIN campaign, are nonetheless disruptive of harmony of effort and impede continuity in the long run.83 Such a 

reaction might include attempting to assert restrictive, complicated, and 

hierarchical control measures on organizations facing complex problems, denying the initiative of subordinate commanders, without recognizing that no such control, outside of one’s own forces, can be gained. 

Thus, Kitson argues, preparing for COIN through education remains an 

absolute requirement.84

Kitson’s distilled argument is that well-educated commanders and 

officers with a talent for fighting can fight—and command—in any conflict environment, with the COIN environment proving no exception. The 

limitations of a conventionally organized, hierarchical military force conducting COIN are negated or mitigated through good leadership. Doctrine 

serves to enable fighting competence, but is itself adapted from a continual 

process of learning in action, accommodating the use of force to the contexts involving the enemy and terrain.
59

Thus, armies are not inherently limited by organization, training, or 

doctrine. Armies are limited by the quality and vision of the their leaders 

and commanders, and the impacts of command leadership that in effect 

predetermines whether or not an organization has leaders with a latent potential for operational art, a critical antecedent condition to organizational 

adaptation and learning. Educating officers to fight in COIN, or war in 

general, particularly through the study of military history of operational 

art in counterinsurgency, can positively serve to shape officer leadership 

through the honing of judgment and intuitive decision-making. As Kitson 

argued, for as long as fighting insurgency remains under the broad banner 

of war fighting, and thus the responsibility of the professional military, 

the officers serving in the military must learn about it through the study 

of military history. In that vein, reading Kitson’s detailed and descriptive, 

approach to countering insurgency is a good way to start.

Focusing one’s attention on Kitson as COIN theorist without consideration of his broad knowledge of the phenomenon of war is to fail in 

general to understand the whole of his thinking on war. Indeed, to claim 

Kitson as an expert in countering insurgency and subversion, while ignoring his other writings concerning warfare as a whole, is to ultimately fail to 

understand him not only as a commander of forces, but also a theorist and 

student of war and warfare, something that he warns against.

Kitson argues against the tendency to over particularize war and warfare—to separate and describe warfare through its tactics instead of its 

purpose—and thus separating that which cannot be clearly separated. He 

appears far less concerned with the dominating trends in tactics, organizations, and equipment, and how associated thinking on such topics influences the vernacular of warfare and the jargon of the day. No, those 

factors are a direct response to the dominating contexts of the period. He 

is, however, seriously concerned with officer education and development, 

that which develops a general and historical understanding on the phenomenon of war.85

Kitson believes officers must learn to think clearly, expand knowledge 

through study, and gain experience. Expansion of knowledge is the product of continuous learning and reading. Experience enables one to learn in 

action.86 Thus, experience and study of history are the two ways to understand war. However, Kitson reminds us that the reading of history does not 

equate to the study of history.87 He warns:

It is all too easy to read military history without studying it. It 

is no good reading a campaign history through as a novel and 
60

leaving it at that. It is first necessary to extract the various plans 

from the narrative and then to examine them from the point of 

view of a staff officer to whom the commander has given them 

for comment. The next thing is to look at the way in which the 

commanders put their plans into effect and finally to see how the 

plans worked out. In other words, read the narrative to absorb 

the background, isolate the various plans made at different times 

during the campaign by both sides and then reread the narrative 

to see what happened.88

Kitson’s arguments presume the availability and quality of military 

history for the purposes of in-depth study. They have to, as study without 

descriptive and detailed military history is at best superficial and sloppy 

and at worst wrong and corrupting. The study of military history is of 

similar importance as experience in military affairs, particular command 

experience. Thus the study of military history and direct experience are 

inseparable components of officer education and development. Kitson was 

reflecting on campaign histories in COIN that began almost 60 years ago. 

What does recent US Army history in COIN tell us about operational art?

Operational Art in Recent COIN History: A Black Hole

Perhaps one of the greatest difficulties in describing operational art in 

COIN is the lack of a comprehensive historical record of how commanders 

thought and acted in OIF, from the company level on up. Instead of a comprehensive record we get so-called lessons learned as well as tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), which are all highly particular and contextual. Such a record would account for context and expose the link between 

abstract thinking about fighting in the COIN environment in OIF and how 

the campaign actually took place, and if such thinking occurred.89 The lack 

of descriptive military history in the form of comprehensive commander 

interviews, debriefs, and oral histories from commanders that served in 

OIF makes writing on the history of operational art in OIF very difficult 

indeed. The COIN environment, particularly as seen in Iraq and perhaps in 

other insurgent environments as well, requires descriptive military history 

to enable scholarly pursuit on the truth of operational art in COIN in OIF 

and its latent potential within combat units fighting insurgency.

A major problem in writing the history stems from the devolution of 

responsibilities of pursuing campaign objectives down to small tactical 

units, even down to the company level.90 This decentralization is layered 

over the top of an operational environment and human terrain that defies 

broad categorization and requires deep familiarity and understanding, just 
61

as the study of COIN in military history requires, as there is no operational 

concept or theory sufficient to the task of educating the practitioner on insurgency, or perhaps war in general. For the historian or scientist conducting research, such conditions require a far broader and deeper collection 

and analysis of information on the conduct of COIN from the company 

level on up, one that leverages descriptive military history. A definitive 

history of operational art in COIN, at least regarding COIN campaigns 

invested with tremendous resources over extended periods of time such as 

that in OIF, requires a much more detailed study based on the collective 

knowledge of commanders and units from the company level on up.

Such a history or collection of knowledge or reflections does not exist. 

The Army has only made halting and inconsistent efforts at collecting the 

oral and intellectual histories of units and commanders that have participated in OIF.91 A true understanding of operational art in COIN requires 

access to such a body of knowledge, which could serve to tell the Army 

how it actually learned, adapted, and improved in operational art over 

time. It may also serve to show how the Army’s success in Iraq occurred 

in spite of itself or ideas of doctrinal determinism, and may provide sufficient evidence to support the claim that unity of effort was never truly 

achieved from the strategic to the tactical level.92 Instead, harmony of effort 

emerged as the latent potential of operational art increased in Army units 

conducting COIN. This improvement stemmed from improved command 

leadership, as commanders learned, reflected, and adapted from their interaction with the operating environment, as well as from their education. 

Commensurately, unit performance also increased as improved potential 

for operational art led to organizational learning and adaptation.

This is not to imply that much has not already been written on Iraq. 

There are several memoirs published by former commanders in Iraq detailing their experiences in COIN.93 There are several books centering on 

the top-down strategic and operational histories of particular periods of 

time in the war, often backed up by gripping tactical narratives.94 There are 

also countless articles in military and scholarly journals that detail individual experiences at various levels of command.

There is nothing written, however, as comprehensive, and thus critical, as a thorough account of the evolution of command leadership in 

OIF, one centered on ideas of operational art and thinking during OIF. 

Instead, the narrative, rather than center on organizational evolution and 

adaptation, centers on transition points and particular tactics, and often on 

particular commanders, where FM 3-24 serves also as a timely transition 

point and a basis for argument. That commanders and units did learn and 
62

adapt is undeniable, but there is no comprehensive body of information to 

leverage that can serve to inform how and why units adapted beyond abstractions, one that captures how thinking changed over time. Perhaps the 

only way to understand how the Army fought, learned, and adapted in Iraq 

is through vicarious learning, through the eyes of individual commanders 

asked the same questions after returning from combat, from the company-level on up, as they reflect on thought and practice.

The quality of the writing that does exist varies significantly, as does 

perspective. Knowledge of events, detail of research, and the purpose of 

the writing vary tremendously. The sum of the parts of all that is written 

is not a substitute for an institutionally driven collection of knowledge 

and insight from those leaders that have fought in Iraq, many for multiple 

tours of duty. Much of that is now perhaps lost to history, or lost in binary 

code, in digits.

A second major problem in writing the history of large COIN campaigns is the use of available data collected for the purposes of shaping 

assessment and informing decision-making during the time of the conflict. 

More specifically, it is the use of this data to inform or buttress historical 

claims or arguments, when the quality, sufficiency, and fidelity of the data 

are highly suspect.

The problem of assessment from abstract data points is not new. The 

use of the Hamlet Evaluation System or HES in Vietnam by the CORDS 

program during the Vietnam War is a good example. The HES modeling 

tool was the primary method used by CORDS and the Department of Defense to assess the effectiveness of the pacification programs used in the 

Vietnam countryside.95 Consisting of eighteen metrics, HES graded the 

level of pacification in the Vietnamese countryside through the eyes of US 

military and civilian personnel assigned to CORDS as advisors.96 The data 

collected was used to shape policy and operational decisions in the war.

97

The data, and perhaps the entire founding assumptions that drove the 

collection mechanism, was often flawed and manipulated to the extent that 

may prove impossible to use the historical HES data for supporting claims 

on the efficacy of the pacification program and the CORDS program as 

well.98 Structural contradictions and conflicts of interest also impacted 

the pursuit of objective assessment, where organizational desires to show 

progress could serve to preempt or influence contrary assessment.99 Army 

FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, cites CORDS as a useful model for future 

hybrid civil-military organizations operating in the COIN environment, 

while also appealing to HES data.100
63

The written history of OIF remains in its infancy, but the Army’s failure to collect the experiences of its combat units and leaders, in descriptive 

personal accounts, will certainly impact that ability of military historians 

to get closer to the a truth and better narrative, particularly on how operational art evolved over time. The surviving data, which awaits declassification and categorization in a byzantine variety of locations and formats in 

the Army’s digital networks, may prove dominated by an impossibly large 

amount of abstract statistical data, driven by arbitrary metrics, and lacking 

in context. History written from such data will prove as controversial and 

problematic as that informed largely by HES data.

The gap in historical knowledge and understanding of operational art 

in COIN, and OIF in particular, results in arguments that mainly center on 

methods and tactics, as described in doctrine and applied in COIN, as well 

as some emphasis on strategy in COIN. Tactics prove too particular as a 

source for a comprehensive historical argument regarding the change in 

the security environment during OIF, as they are subject to the contexts of 

time and location, even in OIF.

Broader strategy arguments concerning US intervention or participation in COIN often center on whether or not the US should fight 

insurgencies, particularly as they rarely pose an existential threat to 

national security but have proven extremely costly in resources.101 If 

US foreign policy was always rational and possessive of great foresight, where politicians retained a clear and unified understanding of 

the threats to the nation and its interests, then policy makers would 

clearly see the risk inherent in military adventures that either involve 

COIN or perhaps may morph into COIN, and thus gain an incentive 

to avoid risk and the moral hazard that such wars often bring. If anything, recent wars have indicated that US foreign policy overestimates 

the effectiveness in military operations in solving strategic problems. 

The lack of a clear national security threat defined as existential means 

that uncertain and politically aligned perceptions of national interest 

will continue to influence US foreign policy, even more so when those 

interests are retained in the governing political party in Washington DC. 

Thus the moral aspects of strategy—such as whether or not the Army 

should fight insurgencies—must not serve to preempt or undercut the 

value that the study of operational art in COIN provides to those that 

may find themselves countering insurgency in the future.102 Indeed, the 

study of military history in counterinsurgency, in the education of future commanders, is arguably far more important than getting the organizing, training, and equipping of organizations right. Fighting skill 
64

can militate against failures of organization or equipment, but it cannot 

make up for poorly educated officers and commanders.

Methods and Tactics in Counterinsurgency

Subtracting arguments of strategy and operations, which includes the 

lack of historical understanding of operational art in recent COIN, leaves 

only arguments surrounding methods and tactics. In the Army, the main 

moral arguments surrounding COIN, whether from a perspective of population-centric or enemy-centric approaches, pivot on the historical correctness and rationale behind official doctrine, namely FM 3-24. Thus doctrine 

serves again, perhaps incorrectly, as the point of departure for argument, 

where the spoils of victory for the winner of the argument become manifest 

in the institutionalization of the winning idea into the character and culture 

of the Army, and determines the way the Army will fight in the future.

There are no indispensable tactics or methods in pursuit of the campaign or strategic objectives in COIN in a broad sense, no strategy by 

slogan or euphemism in COIN such as hearts and minds or courageous 

restraint, or perhaps in any other form of war.103 The efficacy or utility of 

any method or tactic in COIN is often highly particularized to the local 

environment and the enemy, and are not inherently fungible.104 Commanders of units that could rightly be termed learning organizations in OIF are 

often the same commanders with a talent for operational art and thinking. These same commanders, particularly at the brigade level and below, 

learned, adapted, and re-evaluated continuously while fighting in Iraq, and 

did so often without close oversight and sometimes in the face of higher 

headquarters that lacked the same qualities.

Tactics and methods in this context were simply a manifestation of 

combined education and experience, of the quality of command leadership. 

Experience in the form of multiple deployments also helped to inform and 

shape command leadership and the conduct of operations in its pursuit of 

campaign objectives over the course of a twelve-month deployment.
65

Notes

1. Department of the Army, FM 3-0, Operations, 7-1.

2. Department of the Army, Army Doctrinal Publication (ADP) 3-0, Unified 

Land Operations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2011), 9.

3. Unified Land Operations, 10.

4. Unified Land Operations, 10.

5. Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 6-0, Mission Command: 

Command and Control of Army Forces (Washington, DC: Government Printing 

Office, 2003), 1-17.

6. Department of the Army, FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, 4-1. Chapter 4 of the 

FM deals specifically with designing COIN campaigns and operations. See also 5-31 

to “unity of effort” particularly across all Logical Lines of Operations (LLOs).

7. Counterinsurgency, 2-3. FM 3-24 writes extensively on “unity of effort” 

and “unity of command”. Emphasis on unity of effort centers on achieving 

organizational and executive synergy by orienting various organizations working 

in the same environment on the same objectives (military, government, NGO, 

etc). FM 3-24 does not discuss the limits of knowledge and control in the COIN 

environment. The main impression is that “unity of effort” is essentially something that can be controlled by a good senior commander and the military staff 

under “unity of command.”

8. Joseph McLamb, “Battle Command in COIN,” Infantry 99, no. 3 (September-October 2010), 33.

9. Department of the Army, FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, 5-1. FM 3-24 

states that battalions can also use LLOs (logical lines of operation). For an 

example of an Army battalion”s thinking on campaign design and planning, see 

Wes Morrison “Battalion Campaign Design in Iraq,” Infantry 99, no. 3 (September-October 2010), 11-16.

10. McLamb, “Battle Command in COIN,” 33. McLamb describes the problems caused by large staffs—problems that can increase the higher the echelon—when those staffs generate a myriad of requirements for subordinate units 

based on good ideas.

11. Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 5-0, The Operations 

Process (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2010), 2-2, 2-15, 2-95. 

Commanders are required to nest their mission and end state (or objective) with 

their higher headquarters. The purposes of subordinate units” missions are also 

to be nested via the term nested concepts.

12. Ben Zweibelson, “Doctrine and Design: How Analogies and Design 

Theory Resist the Military Ritual of Codification,” Small Wars Journal http://

smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2011/04/to-design-or-not-design-part-2/#c019744 

(accessed 5 April 2011). This essay is part five of five articles written on the 

Small Wars Journal webpage under the group title “To Design or Not to Design” 

under the direction of Chris Paparone. See the comments written by Chris Paparone and others referring to the concept of nesting on the webpage commentary. 

Paparone refers to nesting as a “euphemism for hierarchical control.”
66

13. Nigel Aylwin-Foster, “Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency,” 

Military Review (November-December 2005), 7.

14. Counterinsurgency, 4-6.

15. Counterinsurgency, 5-27. PMESII-PT stands for political, military, 

economic, social, infrastructure, information, physical environment, and time. 

PMESII-PT is a heuristic used to drive information collection and assessment in 

the COIN environment.

16. Counterinsurgency, 5-27. The use of Measures of Effectiveness (MOEs) 

is included in arbitrary reporting requirements. See page 5-27 for definition. 

A MOE is a criterion used to assess changes in system behavior, capability, or 

operational environment that is tied to measuring the attainment of an end state, 

achievement of an objective, or creation of an effect. MOEs focus on the results 

or consequences of actions. MOEs answer the question: “Are we achieving 

results that move us towards the desired end state, or are additional or alternative 

actions required?” These often combined with a superficially scientific approach 

to interpretation through the use of numbers or colors to divine and drive situational understanding.

17. Erik Miller, Counterinsurgency and Operational Art: Is the Joint Campaign Planning Model Adequate?” (Fort Leavenworth, KS: 2003), iii, 56. Miller 

argues that operational art in COIN can be executed through the use of a traditional campaign planning tool, the Joint Campaign Planning Model. On page 

56, Miller describes the planning for branches or sequels, and that the failure of 

a plan to achieve an anticipated outcome is planning failure, and thus assumes 

contingencies can be anticipated. In Miller”s view, the failure of the JCPM is not 

a critique of the model itself, but a critique of the users of the model. However, 

contingency by its definition denies anticipation.

18. Dale Andrade and James Willbanks, “CORDS/Phoenix: Counterinsurgency Lessons for the Future,” Military Review (March-April 2005), 20. 

Andrade and Willbanks provide a small piece of information on the role of conventional forces in Vietnam. The CORDS program, and specifically Operation 

Phoenix, was organized to destroy the Vietnamese Communist Infrastructure 

(VCI). As a proportion, conventional forces killed over 87 percent of the VCI 

assessed as killed in South Vietnam, with the rest killed by Phoenix.

19. This is not intended as a thorough breakdown of modern COIN theory. 

Kitson, perhaps more than any other contemporary officer, remains unrivaled in 

the depth and breadth of his experiences, education, training, and experiential 

roots in all facets of war. While Kitson”s ideas may stand on their own to critique, his reputation and experience compel close scrutiny and reflection.

20. Department of the Army, FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, 3-1. The aphorism that all insurgencies are local is a commonly understood saying for both 

practitioners and theorists alike. It is a simple way of saying that the circumstances, conditions, and influences are very particular and highly variable from 

location to location, even within the same areas.

21. Frank Kitson, Bunch of Five (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), 19.

22. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 282.
67

23. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 282.

24. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 282.

25. Kitson, Bunch of Five, xii.

26. Kitson, Bunch of Five, xii.

27. Kitson, Bunch of Five, xii.

28. Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, and 

Peace-keeping (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 29.

29. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 29.

30. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 282.

31. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 282.

32. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 282.

33. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 282.

34. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 283.

35. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 283.

36. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 283.

37. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 284.

38. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 284-289.

39. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 291.

40. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 285.

41. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 287.

42. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 287.

43. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 287.

44. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 287.

45. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 287.

46. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 287.

47. Opinion of the author. Kitson doesn”t describe his second requirement as 

one of creating a political climate for domestic purposes, but the example of Petraeus and Crocker shaping the political climate in the US Congress in a favorable 

way resulted in the increased political support for the unpopular Iraq War, which in 

effect gave both Petraeus and Crocker more time to execute the campaign.

48. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 287.

49. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 288.

50. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 288.

51. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 289.

52. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 289.

53. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 289.

54. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 289.

55. This paragraph is the opinion of the author.

56. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 297.

57. Understanding the decentralized nature of command in COIN, while 

attempting to attribute campaign success in COIN to a few high authorities is 

very simplistic and poor history. At its worst, it is poor history bereft of a true 

detailed understanding of the diversity of events taking place at local level. One 

can argue that it is simply an attempt to overlay the Great Man Theory of history 

onto COIN.
68

58. In the author”s opinion this is the essential requirement for the effective application of military force in COIN. Developing the capability refers to 

educating officers formally in academically rigorous settings throughout their 

careers emphasizing military history and then assigning them to a wide variety 

of postings to gain broad experience and perspective.

59. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 300.

60. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 301.

61. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 301.

62. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 301.

63. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 165; Clausewitz, On War, 88-89. 

One could argue that this claim is a derivation of Clausewitz”s claim that “the 

first, supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and 

commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which 

they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature.” In this sense, the operational commander faces 

a similar burden at a smaller scale. The commander must determine, based on 

previous experience and education in military history, the scope and quality 

of the problem he faces in the context of COIN. Without this determination or 

orientation, there is perhaps no way that a commander can hope to effectively 

leverage control of the environment.

64. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 165.

65. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 166.

66. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 166.

67. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 166.

68. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 166.

69. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 166.

70. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 166.

71. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 167.

72. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 167.

73. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 167.

74. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 169.

75. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 168.

76. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 169.

77. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 173.

78. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 174.

79. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 174.

80. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 174.

81. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 174.

82. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 174.

83. The US Army certainly experienced this for the first four to five years of 

fighting in COIN. Company grade officers within the battalions and brigades may 

have more experience and education concerning COIN. Intellectual humility in 

the COIN environment is actually a virtue. Traditionally within military hierarchy 

the more senior commanders are significantly more experienced and educated than 

subordinates. Commanders are not evaluated for intellectual hubris or humility.
69

84. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 175.

85. Frank Kitson, Warfare as a Whole (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 2.

86. Frank Kitson, Directing Operations (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 83.

87. Kitson, Directing Operations, 87.

88. Kitson, Directing Operations, 87.

89. Shimon Naveh, In Pursuit of Military Excellence: The Evolution of Operational Theory (Abingdon, UK: Frank Cass, 1997), 15. Naveh coined the term 

cognitive tension to describe the relationship between operational level commanders and planners and their subordinate tactical level commanders and units, 

where the operational level of command has to divine, intuit, extract, distill, etc., 

appropriate and clear tactical tasks to subordinate units from abstract and broad 

political and strategic aims or objectives. Naveh does not specifically address 

insurgency in this regard; see also McLamb, Battle Command in COIN, 32-37.

90. Opinion and experience of the author. This requirement for companies 

(i.e. company commanders) to conduct missions in support of campaign objectives seems obvious and also doctrinally challenging, but it is much more intuitive than an appeal to common sense. The problem revolves around understanding the ability and vision of commanders at all echelons to command units in the 

COIN environment and how their abilities and vision interacted with operational 

environment. It is not clearly linear or hierarchical. Some company commanders, battalion commanders, and brigade commanders experienced significant.

91. There is no Army policy that mandates the formal debriefing or after-action reviews (AARs) of units that have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan. Some 

units do AARs, but there is no requirement. Some military organizations, such 

as the Center for Military History, the Combat Studies Institute, the Center for 

Army Lessons Learned (CALL), etc., do interview former commanders and collect oral histories. Some think tanks, such as RAND and the Council on Foreign 

Relations, also collect historical information and data. But this is scattershot and 

not uniform; and when done, it is often years after the deployment ended.

92. The claim that the Army succeeded in spite of itself refers specifically to 

policies that ought to inhibit success in the COIN environment. This includes the 

unit rotation model, where entire brigade combat teams rotate out at a time. This 

can serve to exacerbate the qualitative differences in leadership in each brigade, 

where the quality of the leadership can have a tremendous impact in the conduct 

of the units conducting COIN operations. An individual rotation model, particularly for certain leaders, would ensure that organizational memory and knowledge and continuity in progress are maintained.

93. This includes Peter Mansoor”s Baghdad at Sunrise.

94. This includes Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: 

The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon 

Books, 2006); Linda Robinson, Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008); 

Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: 

Penguin Press, 2006); David Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency; David Kilcullen, 

The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (New 
70

York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Carter Malkasian, “Counterinsurgency in 

Iraq: May 2003-January 2010,” in Counterinsurgency in Modern War, eds. Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008).

95. Gregory A. Daddis, No Sure Victory: Measuring US Army Effectiveness 

and Progress in the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 

122-125.

96. Daddis, No Sure Victory, 122-125.

97. Daddis, No Sure Victory, 122-125.

98. Daddis, No Sure Victory, 122-125; Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long 

An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Los Angeles: University 

of California Press, 1972), 214-216, and 223. Race argues that HES measured 

superficial information, and created a highly misleading picture; BA030, former 

Army officer serving in CORDS, Interview by Aaron Kaufman and Dustin 

Mitchell, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 24 February, 2011; Interviewee served as a 

district advisor in CORDS in 1971, and stated that HES was essentially a fiasco. 

He was not equipped with enough manpower or experience to collect the information. Deadlines drove everything in the report. His best quote was “figures do 

not lie, but liars figure.” Bill Colby put a lot of stock into the HES report.

99. Daddis, No Sure Victory, 122-125.

100. Department of the Army, FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, 2-12 to 2-13; 

Ross Coffey, “Revisiting CORDS: The Need for Unity of Effort to Secure Victory in Iraq,” Military Review (March-April 2006), 24-34. Coffey advocates for 

the establishment of a CORDS-like program to pursue pacification in Iraq.

101. Douglas MacGregor, “Lean, Mean, Fighting Machine,” Foreign 

Policy, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/26/lean_mean_fighting_machine, (accessed 26 April 2011). MacGregor, a former Army officer, is 

an ardent opponent of using US forces to fight insurgencies, as it is not in US 

national interest.

102. Opinion of the author. Nor can the Army or the Department of Defense 

create doctrine that dictate the terms of the employment of military forces, such as 

seen in the Weinberger Doctrine and its famous derivative, the Powell Doctrine.

103. Dave Dillegge, “Hearts and Minds,” Small Wars Journal, http://

smallwarsjournal.com /blog/2007/10/hearts-and-minds/ (accessed 24 April 

2011). Hearts and Minds was a term first attributed popularly General Sir Gerald 

Templer during his service as Director for Operations and High Commissioner 

of Malaya during the Malayan Emergency in 1952. The original quote was “The 

answer lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and 

minds of the Malayan People.” In this context, public perception on who was 

winning the fight was essential. Convincing the people that their interests lay 

with the government and COIN intervening force was essential. If they thought 

the government was going to win, then their interest lay in siding with the government and COIN force. Their heart, or emotions would follow. The euphemism, however, has created the impression that hearts and minds means being 

nice or coddling of the local population. Templer”s efforts were highly coercive 

and forceful, however. The misunderstanding persists today.
71

104. Mike Shuster, “Iraqi Leader Breaks with US Plan for Security Wall,” 

interview on National Public Radio hosted by Melissa Block (23 April 2007), 

http://m.npr.org/news/ front/9783129?singlePage=true (accessed 15 April 2011). 

Personal experience of the author. An example of the misapplication of successful tactics occurred in Baghdad in 2007. The 2d Brigade, 1st Infantry Division 

used extensive neighborhood compartmentalization as a method to control violence and insurgent movement beginning in late 2006. The wall proved effective. 

By April 2007, attacks and murders dropped significantly. Contrast this with 

the reaction of the Sunni enclave in Adamiyah in East Baghdad. The compartmentalization of Adamiyah by 2d Brigade, 82d Division began in March 2007, 

was based on the successful application of the tactic in West Baghdad. The wall 

proved to be an information operations disaster and required significant damage 

control. The major failure involved promoting the plan effectively and gaining 

support from the besieged community.

73

CHAPTER 4

OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM: 

A WAR OF MANAGEMENT

Operation Iraqi Freedom: A Synopsis

Operation Iraq Freedom began officially on 19 March 2003, with the 

ground invasion of Iraq from Kuwait.1 The initial combined air and ground 

offensive to defeat the Iraqi Armed Forces and occupy Iraq would last until 

around 4 May 2003.2 In May 2003, under the authority of UN Resolution 

1483, the Coalition Provisional Authority would be established to assume 

the political control of Iraq after the end of major combat operations, under 

the leadership of L. Paul Bremer.3 The transition from combat operations 

to stability operations would transfer regional strategic and operational 

command from 3d Army, Combined Forces Land Component Command 

(CFLCC) to an interim Combined/Joint Task Force headquarters, formally 

known as CJTF-7.4 The US Army’s V Corps would assume command of 

CJTF-7 in May, with Lieutenant General (LTG) Ricardo Sanchez replacing 

LTG William Wallace as V Corps Commander. Thus, V Corps, normally 

an operational level headquarters, but a tactical headquarters during the 

major combat phase of OIF, would assume control over military strategy 

and operations in stabilizing transitional Iraq with the objective of pulling 

the vast majority of land forces out of Iraq by 2003.5

Operational and strategic turbulence served to disrupt the plan to pull 

occupying US forces out of Iraq by September 2003. In May 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) issued its two most controversial orders, 

CPA Orders 1 and 2, covering de-Baathification and the dissolution of the 

former Iraqi intelligence and security apparatuses.6 Beginning in June 2003, 

US forces began to experience the initial manifestations of nationwide insurgency that would rapidly escalate in the following months, with the most 

devastating initial attacks occurring against the Jordanian Embassy and 

against the UN mission to Iraq in August 2004.7 Political progress proved 

slow in the background of increasing violence stemming from a growing 

Sunni insurgency and political discontent within the Shia community. Despite this, President Bush order the CPA to develop a plan to transition sovereignty to an Interim Iraqi Government (IIG) by June 2004.8

The lack of stability and progress in security forced the occupation to 

extend, and beginning in January 2004, the US Army and Marine Corps 

began a unit rotation plan that involved rotating combat formations and 

support elements for fixed tours. In May 2004, CJTF-7 was split into 
74

two headquarters, designated Multinational Forces-Iraq (MNF-I), and 

Multi-National Corps-Iraq (MNC-I). The split reflected the necessity of 

placing theater-strategic command under a four-star headquarters, MNF-I, 

where MNC-I would assume responsibility for the command and control 

of US forces conducting combat operations to defeat the growing insurgency.9

 The CPA formally dissolved after the establishment of the IIG in 

June 2004, nominally transferring political sovereignty back to the Iraqis.

The security situation appeared to stabilize after the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003, but ultimately proved fleeting. April 2004 

saw a massive and violent uprising against the occupation and CPA by the 

followers of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in the cities of Baghdad, Najaf, 

Karbala, and Kut.10 Defeating this uprising required the extension and rapid redeployment of the Army’s 1st Armored Division to the south of Iraq. 

Concurrently in Al Anbar province, the US Marine Corps forces witnessed 

the coalescence and increased militarization of the Sunni insurgency and 

rejectionist movements, manifested in strength in the city of Fallujah. US 

Army forces, particularly elements of the 1st Infantry Division operating in 

Salah ad-Din Province experienced the same in the city of Samarra.11 These 

movements eventually posed a strategic and operational threat to both political and security progress, particularly with the first Iraqi elections approaching in January 2005, forcing a series of major combat operations in the fall 

of 2004 to clear the cities of Samarra and Fallujah of insurgents, formally 

known as Operation Baton Rouge and Operation Al Fajr, respectively.12

The advent of Army General George Casey as the commander of 

MNF-I on 1 June 2004, saw the first manifestations of a theater-strategic 

campaign plan, along multiple lines of operations, that sought to link political transition in Iraq in the form of elections to security operations to 

defeat the insurgency and build the Iraqi Security Forces.13 This campaign 

plan detached Coalition Forces from occupational authority towards a 

path emphasizing partnership with the Iraqi Government.14 Concurrently, 

the development of the new internal and external security apparatuses fell 

on a new headquarters subordinate to MNF-I, designated as the Multi-National Security Transition Corps-Iraq (MNSTC-I).15

The MNSTC-I, with its three-star headquarters, would serve under a 

broad mandate to build the capacity of the ISF through initial entry training, 

unit set fielding of equipment, developing the institutional training and education base, and personnel recruitment and unit manning.16 Perhaps, most 

importantly, MNSTC-I was responsible for the coaching and mentoring of 

operational ISF units, and would use small teams of officers and NCOs, 

labeled transition teams and, according to one account, modeled on the 
75

British Army Training Teams (BATT) that served in Dhofari Rebellion, to 

accomplish this mission.17 The MNSTC-I mission was complementary to, 

but separate from, the MNC-I security operations aimed at defeating the insurgency. As the ISF developed capacity and capability over time, US forces 

conducting COIN could be replaced with capable ISF in line with the politico-military strategy of transition to Iraqi and ISF control.

In 2005, the transition strategy continued apace with the execution of 

three major political events. The first event was the provincial and national 

elections that occurred in January 2005. In October, Iraq held its constitutional referendum, followed by the Iraqi parliamentary elections in December 2005. The security environment appeared to stabilize somewhat 

in 2005, particularly in Baghdad and other population centers, whereas 

other areas saw the reestablishment of insurgent safe havens.18 In general, 

the insurgency continued to adapt in lethality and efficiency. Gains within 

the security environment proved ephemeral in February 2006, when Sunni 

insurgents destroyed the Shiite shrine known as the Al-Askariya Mosque 

in Samarra.19 This act set alight the sectarian fires that led to civil war and a 

huge expansion of violence along sectarian lines, primarily between Sunni 

and Shia Arab.

The year 2006 can be roughly be characterized as an Iraqi civil war, 

a civil war not of conventional means, but one executed through the destruction of civil society and norms at the hands of Sunni nationalists 

and Al Qaeda allies, and perhaps more destructively at the hands of Iranian-backed Shia militia elements. US commanders would attempt and 

fail to contain this violence, particularly strong in Baghdad, in a series of 

operations heavily reliant on ISF units incapable of conducting COIN and 

often tainted primarily by Shia sectarian influence.20

The civil war thus served to place the transition strategy on a temporary hiatus until the security environment could be stabilized to the extent 

that it did not threaten the ability of Iraq to exist as a viable state. The recognition of local security as the critical element in stabilization, preceding 

transition, led formally to the increase of US forces and General David 

Petraeus assuming command of MNF-I.21

The immediate operational and strategic effects of the surge are relatively well known. Violence decreased precipitously in late 2007 and 

2008. The capability and number of ISF units also increased apace. Arguably this was due to the recognition that the transition team model for 

partnership was inadequate, that in the context of the complex COIN environment of Iraq, improving ISF capability without the resources of regular 
76

forces, particularly conventional Army and Marine Corps units, is impossible. The Army formally began deploying brigade combat teams labeled 

as Advise and Assist brigades in 2009, ostensibly trained and augmented 

for advisory capacity that followed the implementation of the US-Iraq Security Agreement mission in 2009 and would continue past the end of USlead combat operations in 2010.

The broad overview of the campaign in Iraq and the success achieved 

should not serve as a vindication of organizational and institutional adaptation, learning, and development. While units engaged in COIN certainly 

learned, adapted, and reformed, it is unclear whether the military bureaucracy did the same, beyond thinking of the war in six to twelve month 

increments, or looking for the next available BCT to deploy.

Preparing for Deployment: Taking Bureaucracy to War

The way in which military organized, planned, and conducted the 

extended COIN campaign in Iraq brings into question the commitment 

to operational and strategic progress during Operation Iraqi Freedom 

and later Operation New Dawn. Superficially, the needs of the various 

headquarters and bureaucracies in managing the war appeared to trump 

a requirement to achieve and maintain continuity in the operating environment through unit transitions and changing strategy.22 The requirements of the campaign appear secondary to those of the bureaucracy and 

its managerial approach to warfare, and serves to highlight Secretary of 

Defense Gates’ comments on how the Pentagon is proficient at war planning but not war execution.

Structural impediments to continuity, progress, and learning were 

built-in from the beginning of OIF.23 All units deploying to Iraq beginning 

in 2003 would serve discrete tours, maintaining unit integrity through a 

unit replacement system and not an individual replacement system. Army 

units would train, deploy, fight, and redeploy as cohorts. Unit replacement 

was promoted as an antidote to the failed replacement system as seen in 

Vietnam and critical to unit integrity. Unit integrity, however, was hardly 

maintained once units arrived to Iraq.24 Rather, the efforts to manage the 

war, to ensure that the relatively small, professional Army in its fragility 

deployed in a sustainable and supportable fashion appeared to trump the 

needs of commanders and units in Iraq attempting to transform the security environment in pursuit of transition.

This approach to warfare gives the impression that bureaucratic necessity often supersedes operational requirements, or did in the context of 

the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Tactical and operational progress 
77

and the ability to gain and maintain the initiative as well as sustain it over 

time—through unit transitions—appeared less important than meeting bureaucratic requirements in force management. This model of providing 

forces anticipates disruption to continuity over time, but retains no mechanism to mitigate predictable effects. In other words, the deployment and 

employment model sacrificed continuity with little guarantee of a positive return.25 The circumstances of war as determined by the relationship 

between US forces, the enemy, and the environment did not necessarily 

serve to inform managerial decisions that may prove deleterious to campaign progress in OIF.26

The Army’s approach to force management is titled Army Force Generation, or ARFORGEN.27 The ARFORGEN model is the bureaucratic 

tool the Army uses to generate trained, equipped, and ready forces to support the requirements of the joint force or combatant commander conducting operations in a theater of war, as well as other Army requirements. The 

ARFORGEN model seeks to ensure that units are properly resourced in 

personnel and equipment, and properly trained prior to employment. The 

ARFORGEN model is cyclic and continuous, and all operational forces 

in the Army, whether deployed or recently redeployed, are categorized in 

some form under ARFORGEN.28

The planning methodology and bureaucratic-managerial approach 

to limited war, particularly in COIN, imposes significant risk to operational continuity and success. In the context of OIF, little consideration 

was made for the preservation of unit experience, learning, and adaptation 

across multiple deployments, beyond TTPs. Additionally, in order to position forces in theater, units were assessed—in the abstract—of similar capability and thus equally capability, whether an infantry battalion or field 

artillery battalion, which has far less people. Other factors, such as organizational leadership, culture, and previous experience in order to position 

forces in theater did not inform decisions regarding force employment.

ARFORGEN ensures this problem will persist. Generating forces 

across the Army for deployment necessitates the disassembly and harvesting of unit officer and NCO leadership to place in other units after a 

deployment. Thus organizational leadership and character can vary significantly from deployment to deployment. Further aggravating the risk 

to operational continuity is the failure of the Army to mandate and collect 

detailed, critical, and introspective after-action reviews (AARs) and oral 

histories of commanders from the company level on up that could serve 

to inform how Army leaders and units learned and adapted over time, employing, or not, operational art and thinking to problems encountered.
78

All that remains to mitigate risk to operational progress and continuity 

during unit transitions is the fourteen-day relief in place (RIP) typical of 

unit transitions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ability of units to forecast 

areas of employment in theater, and thus the ability to gain a more detailed 

understanding of their future operating environment, has proved unreliable in the past, both in Iraq and Afghanistan.29

The ability to improve tactically and operationally in war, including 

COIN, requires the proper positioning forces to effectively interact with 

the environment, which is in essence maneuver, both physically and cognitively. Once positioned, forces can properly orient efforts and thus take 

advantage of emergent opportunities to gain and maintain the initiative 

through the sequencing of tactical actions in time, space, and purpose. 

Fundamentally, dispersed, wide-area operations require deep understanding, familiarity, collective learning, and adapting—all contingent on the 

latent potential in operational art in the unit and commander—in order to 

achieve progress in campaigns and sustain momentum. OIF demonstrated 

that the primacy of force generation—to finding another BCT to deploy—

often occurs at the expense of requirement to achieve sustained operational momentum over years and multiple deployments.

The ARFORGEN process does contribute to preparing units to deploy, directly through training and education programs and mission rehearsal exercises (MREs), and indirectly through the recycling of leaders 

and soldiers with deployment experience into units preparing to deploy. 

Experiential learning, however, is not organizationally maintained; it is 

individually maintained. Thus, experiential learning is hypothetically 

distributed through cross-pollination, or a trickling down of experience 

throughout the operational force.

The efficacy of trickle-down learning is controversial, however, as it 

often lacks contextual and collective understanding and is comprised of 

many particular experiences that have often have significant moral considerations. Distributed particular experience may lead to adaptation within military units that have the right leadership climate, one that fosters 

dialogue and expects critical thinking. Complementary to establishing 

the right climate, good leaders must also subject previous experience to 

critique, as individuals new to a unit may come burdened with poorly informed ideas as to what is effective in COIN stemming from previous 

deployments, lest those methods infect subordinate organizations with bad 

habits.30 The dismantling of particular ideas through well-articulated arguments is as critical as it is difficult, as there are often deep emotions associated with previous experiences. The learning organization in the context 
79

of US units conducting COIN in Iraq, rather than being a natural manifestation of varying and distributed experience coalescing to breed learning 

and adaptation while in combat, is the product of command leadership at 

the brigade level and below.

The Surge in Context: Towards a Better Equilibrium

In many ways, the reinforcement of Iraq with 20,000 additional US 

forces, known as the surge represented less of a drastic change in strategy, 

operations, and tactics than is commonly portrayed. While the impacts of 

top-level leadership decisions are certainly important, the surge in essence 

represented a period of time when strategy, rather than being isolated from 

events, was better aligned to environmental reality, where strategy could 

take advantage of tactical and operational progress that Army and Marine Corps leaders units had achieved locally and regionally over several 

years.31 The most consequential decision overall was President Bush’s decision to shift from a transition strategy to a local security strategy. This 

decision, backed by additional military and civilian resources, effectively 

enabled commanders from General Petraeus down to company commanders the ability to assume risk in innovation and take advantage of emergences in the COIN environment, most notably the Anbar Awakening. The 

additional forces enabled the MNC-I commander, General Odierno, the 

ability to implement his operational vision instead of having to harvest 

and reposition forces already engaged in COIN.32 The surge provided the 

MNC-I commander the capability to leverage a true operational force rather than resort to tactical palliatives supplied by forces already on mission 

in Iraq. For eighteen months, beginning in January 2007, strategy was 

better aligned to the operational and tactical realities as determined by the 

relationship between coalition forces, the terrain, and the enemy.

The surge did not necessarily represent a radical shift in approach that 

manifested in greater unity of effort, whether within US forces or between 

US forces and Iraqi Security Forces, thus leading to better outcomes. Operationally and tactically, many commanders conducting COIN felt unconstrained in the implementation of their collective visions, similar to 

units pre-surge, often due to either a lack of guidance or vision on the 

part of more senior commanders and staffs. Additional forces and resources, the decreasing size of operational areas, and the assuming of risk by 

the President and MNF-I enabled commanders to innovate and seize the 

initiative as opportunities arose. In this environment, commanders pulled 

their military staffs forward and were able to operate without the risk of 

strategic decisions derailing progress or reactionary operational decisions 

to address immediate crises.
80

Indeed, perhaps the surge represented only a temporary hiatus in the 

transition strategy. In the context of the surge, brigade, battalion, and company commanders operated in the same operational environment since the 

beginning of OIF in 2003, an environment often characterized by little 

oversight and broad authorities.33 As compared to 2003-2004 however, 

many commanders and leaders had the benefit of significant experience in 

the COIN environment through multiple deployments.34 Perhaps this better explains the synergy and harmony of effort that emerged as the effects 

of the surge took hold. This experiential and historical learning served as a 

catalyst to organizational adaptation—in essence operational art—born of 

better command leadership, vision, and understanding of the environment, 

and thus to different approaches to COIN in OIF. Various examples exist 

of well-led Army and Marine Corps unit achieving operational progress 

pre-surge, particularly in the provinces of Anbar and Ninevah.35

Theater strategy during the surge represented a true capitalization of 

local and regional progress generated through innovative and adaptive 

commanders with a longer-term vision towards continuity and stability. 

Previous to the surge, constrained resources and the drive to transition 

meant that local security was a short-term metric to justify repositioning 

of forces, transitioning to newly formed and often incapable ISF units, and 

a decrease in US brigades deployed to Iraq.36

There is risk in appealing to moral ascendency when looking at the 

surge historically, to claim that perhaps the US and its forces in Iraq finally 

figured it out during the surge, and thus proved victorious not only over the 

insurgency but also over internal dysfunction manifested strategically and 

often operationally. The experience of commanders in Iraq after the surge 

tends to refute claims that internal dysfunction was defeated.

Perhaps the US Army could stand to learn from the British Army in its 

retrospective analysis of the failure of the British to pacify Basra, which ended 

ignominiously in 2008 and led to the Iraqi-led, US-enabled Operation Charge 

of the Knights.37 Juxtaposing the US approach with the British approach could 

lead one to conclude that because the British Army did not participate in the 

surge, the US approach in strategy and operations was superior. This conclusion, however, is insufficiently self critical and perhaps ahistorical.

Arguably, the surge does not represent a vindication of the war in Iraq 

throughout its various phases, as good operations are no substitute for strategic failures and other miscues that extended the conflict. However, the 

Army ought to retain a deep reservoir of fighting experience from OIF and 

OEF, one that should provide depth of knowledge and wisdom regarding 
81

operational art, regardless of strategic and policy failures. The true legacy 

of OIF should be frank dialogue, and inter-Army introspection, leading to 

conclusions that the Army, in its institutional traditions and norms, in its 

hierarchical organizations with large staffs predisposed to scientific processes, and most important in its professional military education of officers and future commanders, was poorly prepared to fight and win in the 

COIN environment and incapable of the task of winning all wars.

In the end, the history of OIF may find fertile ground in management 

theory and problem solving, as arguably the records of how the Department of Defense and the Army generated and managed forces in support 

of OIF are stored in the United States, separated from the turbulence and 

ambiguity of the war. History in this form may show us how the military 

overcame internal sources of friction to provide the commander with adequate numbers of forces. It will not, however, provide military practitioners and students of military history any reasonable basis to argue as to 

how the US Army learned and adapted over time while in combat. Gaining 

a better understanding on how the Army learned and adapted in Iraq will 

not start from general arguments concerning big ideas or arguments. Rather, it will start from interviews conducted with commanders and planners 

with direct experience and significant responsibility.
82

Notes

1. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 552.

2. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 554.

3. Donald P. Wright and Timothy R. Reese, On Point II, Transition to the 

New Campaign: The United States Army and Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 

2003-January 2005 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: CSI Press, 2008), 26.

4. Reese, On Point II, Transition to the New Campaign, 27. CFLCC stands 

for Combined Forces Land Component Command. CFLCC commanded under 

the authority of CENTCOM.

5. Reese, On Point II, Transition to the New Campaign, 27.

6. Reese, On Point II, Transition to the New Campaign, 26.

7. Reese, On Point II, Transition to the New Campaign, 32.

8. Reese, On Point II, Transition to the New Campaign, 37.

9. Reese, On Point II, Transition to the New Campaign, 176.

10. Reese, On Point II, Transition to the New Campaign, 39.

11. Reese, On Point II, Transition to the New Campaign, 43.

12. Reese, On Point II, Transition to the New Campaign, 43.

13. Reese, On Point II, Transition to the New Campaign, 177. The title of the 

campaign plan was “Partnership: From Occupation to Constitutional Elections.”

14. Reese, On Point II, Transition to the New Campaign, 177.

15.Reese, On Point II, Transition to the New Campaign, 450.

16. Reese, On Point II, Transition to the New Campaign, 451-454.

17. BL020, UK Battle Group Commander in Operation Telic, Interview by 

Aaron Kaufman and Tom Walton, Warminster, UK, 31 March 2011. The interviewee stated that the concept of the Transition Team stemmed from the advice 

of a British Army officer working for MNSTC-I in 2004.

18. This includes, but is not exclusive to, Mosul, Tal Afar, and Ramadi.

19. Malkasian, “Counterinsurgency in Iraq,” 301.

20. Malkasian, “Counterinsurgency in Iraq,” 303. This includes Operations 

Together Forward I and II in summer of 2006.

21. Malkasian, “Counterinsurgency in Iraq,” 304.

22. The needs of the planning bureaucracy—the needs of the supply side 

of the war effort—are not necessarily aligned with the needs of the campaign 

to maintain continuity and progress over time. The combatant commander, e.g. 

CENTCOM, submits Request For Forces (RFFs) that are validated and approved 

through the Joint Staff and tasked to service components to fulfill. In OIF, operating under the unit manning and rotation model, this applied to corps-level staffs 

and below. Other individual and joint billets for personnel are often filled with 

people that lack any qualification or experience to function effectively in their 

assigned duty, as often seen in the advisory efforts. The normal human resources 

bureaucracy, such as Army Human Resources Command (HRC) works to fulfill 

the requirements as determined by the planning bureaucracy. The needs of the theater campaign, for ensuring continuity and progress, may be better served through 

recycling individuals and units with particular experience and proven success 
83

into the same areas where they served previously. See also BC010, Field Grade 

Officer, Interview by Robert Green and Aaron Kaufman, Fort Bragg, NC, 1 March 

2011. See also BG030, Battalion Commander, Interview by Mark Battjes, Nathan 

Springer, and Thomas Walton, Fort Irwin, CA, 14 March 2011. Both interviews 

discuss the frustration of working with people arbitrarily selected for serving as 

advisors, without any particular qualification or skill.

23. Thomas A. Ball, “Bureaucratic Decision Making in Troop Rotation Policy for OIF-2” (National Defense University: 2004), 8. See also John D. Winkler, 

“Stability and Cohesion: How Much is Needed,” in The New Guard and Reserve 

eds. John D. Winkler and Barbara A. Bicksler (San Ramon, CA: Falcon Books, 

2010), 29-43. Winkler argues that cohesion may be overemphasized as a justification for unit rotation. See also Roger Kaplan, “Army Unit Cohesion in Vietnam: A Bum Rap,” Parameters 17 (September 1987), 58-67. Individual rotation 

policy may have had deleterious effects on unit cohesion, but there were many 

more contributing factors. Personal experience of the author. Vietnam was cited 

by various leaders as justification for the unit rotation model. BA040, Brigade 

Commander, Interview by Aaron Kaufman and Dustin Mitchell, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 23 February 2011; BE060, Brigade Commander, Interview by Mark 

Battjes and Thomas Walton, Fort Irwin, CA, 9 March 2011. Former commanders 

discuss the frustration of having their units stripped from them after arriving in 

theater. While an individual replacement is certainly detrimental for building 

combat teams training for deployment, a hybrid approach involving individual 

and unit replacements at some level may have proven more effective, such as 

rotating battalions and companies, and not brigades. Headquarters personnel and 

more senior commanders could rotate out individually.

24. BA010, Brigade Commander, Interview by Richard Johnson and 

Thomas Walton, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 22 February 2011; BA040, Interview; 

BC020, Brigade Commander, Interview by Robert Green and Aaron Kaufman, 

Fort Bragg, NC, 2 March 2011; BD010, Battalion Commander, Interview by 

Benjamin Boardman and Dustin Mitchell, Fort Knox, KY, 14 March 2011; 

BE060, Interview; BH020, Brigade Commander, Interview by Mark Battjes, 

Ben Boardman, Robert Green, Richard Johnson, Aaron Kaufman, Dustin 

Mitchell, Nathan Springer, and Thomas Walton, Washington, DC, 21 March 

2011; BH030, Iraq Veterans Panel, Interview by Mark Battjes, Robert Green, 

Aaron Kaufman, and Dustin Mitchell, Washington, DC, 22 March 2011. 

During the time before the surge and during the surge, Army BCTs were often 

stripped of organic battalions, and not often informed of the plans until they 

arrived in Kuwait prior to onward movement to Iraq. From experience, this 

included, 1st and 2d brigades of the 1st Cavalry Division, 2d and 4th brigades 

of the 1st Infantry Division, 2d Brigade 1st Armored Division, 2d and 3d 

Brigades 3d Infantry Division, 2d Stryker Cavalry Regiment, 3d Brigade 2d 

Infantry Division. This is not all inclusive, but reflects a general approach to 

managing the COIN campaign through the harvesting of battalions.

25. BD010, Interview. During the initial part of OIF, OIF I to II and perhaps 

later, the impression of units operating in Iraq was that the strategy was to get out 
84

of Iraq, that the war was a plan of the next six months; BH030, Interview. Force 

management decisions prior to 2006 were heavily weighted towards decreasing the 

number of brigades in Iraq in line with the transition strategy, and not the operational 

or tactical requirements. Operational decisions that involved the rapid shifting of 

combat power in Iraq, as well as the extension of unit deployments, to ameliorate 

crises were the norm from 2003 to late 2006. Operational examples includes Al Kut, 

Karbala, and Najaf in spring 2004, Samarra, Fallujah and Mosul in the fall and winter of 2004-2005, Ninevah in 2005, Al Anbar in 2006, and Baghdad in 2006.

26. Lionel Beehner, “US Military Strategy in Iraq,” http://www.cfr.org/iraq/

us-military-strategy-iraq/p10434 (accessed 19 May 2011). Beehner cites several 

comments regarding the unit rotation policy in Iraq and how it imposes turbulence rather than stability in the environment. Cited academics include Stephen 

Biddle and Andrew Bacevich.

27. Department of the Army, Army Regulation (AR) 525-29, Army Force 

Generation (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, March 2011).

28. Army Force Generation, 1. The categories of unit readiness under 

ARFORGEN are Reset/Train, Ready, and Available. Subcategories under 

ARFORGEN include equipment, manning, funding, and training. ARFORGEN 

enables the Army the ability to forecast requirements for ensuring proper levels 

of equipping, manning, and funding align with training requirements.

29. BA010, Interview; BH020, Interview; BH030, Interview; BE090, Battalion Commander, Interview by Robert Green and Aaron Kaufman, Fort Irwin, 

CA, 7 March 2011.

30. Personal experience of the author. Several examples of poor or questionable tactics serve to highlight the persistence of bad ideas. The validity of warning shots as a force protection measure for patrols is one example. Another example involves the use of baited sniper ambushes. One of the main justifications 

for the use of warning shots in OIF was to protect patrols and convoys from the 

suicide vehicle-borne IED (VBIED) threat, and it requires an assumption that a 

suicide VBIED threat can be deterred through warning shots. This assumption 

is questionable at best; particularly after US forces received a full complement 

of up-armored motor vehicles. The use of baited sniper ambushes is also highly 

questionable, both morally and practically. Killing insurgents is certainly a part 

of COIN warfare, but it is also a question of killing the right people. Baited 

ambushes tend to kill the low-level insurgent, or perhaps a man paid to take the 

bait. The use of lethal force in this context may serve only to motivate the COIN 

force, and serves no broader practical purpose in either defeating the insurgency 

or in stabilization. It is force for its own sake, and thus morally suspect.

31. James A. Russell, Innovation, Transformation, and War: Counterinsurgency Operations in Anbar and Ninewa Provinces, Iraq, 2005-2007 (Stanford, 

CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). Russell’s book was published in April 

2011 as this thesis was being written. Russell’s book is a detailed study of several 

Army and Marine Corp units at the brigade and battalion level that experienced 

significant success in Iraq, and he attributes the success to innovative leadership 
85

and culture that learned and adapted from the bottom-up without the assistance of 

doctrine and within a culture and environment of decentralized leadership.

32. BH030, Interview.

33. BG100, Brigade Commander, Interview by Mark Battjes and Nathan 

Springer, Fort Stewart, GA, 16 March 2011.

34. BG040, Brigade Commander, Interview by Nathan Springer and Thomas Walton, Fort Stewart, GA, 15 March 2011.While not absolute, some commanders had extensive experience in non-traditional assignments that enabled 

them the ability to adapt quickly.

35. Commonly cited pre-surge examples include the 101st Airborne Division 

operating in the Ninevah Province in OIF II, the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment operating in Ninevah Province in 2005, 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division operating in 

Anbar Province in 2006, and 1st Battalion, 7th Marines operating in Anbar in 2005.

36. The drive to decrease the number of brigade combat teams and transition to ISF control in line with the transition strategy led to several reactionary 

operations in 2006 to address the rapidly escalating civil war occurring in Baghdad in mid-2006 following the bombing of the Al Askari Mosque in Samarra. 

The named operations were Operation Together Forward I and Operation 

Together Forward II.

37. Alex Alderson, The Validity of British Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine After the War in Iraq 2003-2009 (November 2009), 12.

87

CHAPTER 5

DEDUCTION FROM DIRECT EXPERIENCE: 

GENERAL THOUGHTS ON LEARNING 

ORGANIZATIONS IN OIF

The interviews and articles cited for the bulk of this essay center mainly on commanders and other officers that retained significant authority and 

direct experience in OIF throughout the entire campaign. While it is beyond the scope of this thesis to claim general principle from the available 

sources, the interviews do provide an emerging case for how units learned 

and adapted over time. This chapter highlights general ideas concerning 

command leadership, leadership climate, learning organizations, and how 

these things enabled learning and adaptation while in combat.

Command Leadership and Learning Organizations

Perhaps the most consequential variable in determining the ability of 

an Army combat unit to become a learning organization, to achieving progress in the COIN environment, is the quality of command leadership at the 

company, battalion, and brigade levels. The character of the commander 

has a significant influence on how the unit fights, learns, and adapts in contact with the environment and thus portends a general operational impact.

However, bureaucratic necessity, not operational necessity, dominates 

the approach to command selection in the US Army, even in the wartime 

environment of OIF and OEF. Whereas company commanders are selected from a slate of officers in Army brigades, battalion and brigade commanders are selected from a centrally managed board in a process that has 

not changed in decades. Selection for command depends less on previous experience and success in the COIN environment, or competence in 

warfare, and more on achieving success in institutionally mandated career benchmarks. The suitability of this traditional bureaucratic method 

remains unclear; although in fairness, the process has proven relatively 

good at selecting the right commander.

On 15 May 2011, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates reflected on his 

experiences in a 60 Minutes interview with Katie Couric. Gates remarked 

that his greatest challenge as the Secretary of Defense was “leading an 

organization that is good at planning for wars, but not at waging them.”1

Gates comments appeal to change, but it remains to be seen if any change 

to the way our war bureaucracy functions in the long term actually manifests. Fundamentally, his statement indicates the persistence in the way 

military bureaucracy operates, even in war. Thus, the emergence of learn-
88

ing organizations as a function of the quality of the command leadership 

at all levels occurred perhaps in spite of the bureaucracy and not because 

of it. While the surge in 2007 and the strategic priority placed on local 

security may represent a better alignment of strategy to environmental 

and tactical reality, Gates’ frustration may serve to temper any idea that 

the military-bureaucratic management approach to war had anything to 

do with operational success in Iraq, although the bureaucracy did prove 

capable in providing new forces when required and during the surge. The 

problems of bureaucracy are not only a problem for large organizations, 

but also within traditionally organized military staffs.

Learning Organizations in OIF: Wither the Military Staff?

One of the greatest challenges facing commanders at the battalion level and above is aligning the various appendages of staff to the vision of 

the commander. Traditionally and doctrinally, the military staff seeks to 

get ahead of the commander through anticipating the commander’s requirements in understanding, visualizing, and describing the operational 

environment, and then directing subordinate units through the orders process. In theory, the staff provides the majority of information and analysis 

a commander requires in order making tactical and operational decisions. 

Layered within this paradigm are tools and processes that separate relevant and critical information, empower the staff to make better recommendations to enable command decisions, and thus keep the unit oriented to 

its purpose and objectives. Battles and operations are managed from the 

collective analytical staff brain in command and control nodes to ensure 

unity of effort and synergy.

The major problem in COIN warfare, and perhaps in all of war, is that 

the staff in its structure and organization is too distant to directly interact 

with the environment. While staff processes exist to assist the commander 

and subordinate units, the processes in essence are internally focused and 

oriented. Organizational, technical, and operational complexity all conspire to cognitively isolate the staff—and possibly the commander—from 

the environment, leading to fixation on internal dynamic interactions, thus 

preventing adaptation to rapidly changing external circumstances.2

The military staff in the US Army tradition has increased in size and 

complexity significantly since the early 1900s. Operational doctrine regarding staff operations has also correspondingly developed apace. The 

current Army Field Manual 5-0, The Operations Process, is the distant 

offspring of the 1940 US Army Field Manual (FM) 101-5, Staff Officers 

Field Manual: The Staff and Combat Orders.

3

 Evolutionary changes in 
89

US Army staff doctrine can give the impression that extremely detailed 

and analytical processes are the sine qua non of staff operations and planning and the precursor to successful operations.4

 Progress and evolution 

in staff doctrine is thus simply an improvement on the science of control 

and administrative planning, perhaps based on an assumption of doctrinal 

superiority.

The experience of commanders in Iraq indicate indirectly that the 

growth in the staff and associated information technology did not manifest in better intuitive leadership, or even better situational understanding locally, where empirical data in the form of metrics might provide a 

greater impulse to change methods. Learning and adaptation, the qualities 

of a learning organization and the manifestation of operational thinking 

and art, were born of intuitive leadership and inductive processes stemming from deliberate choices by commanders to gain the most information 

through direct experience and continuous dialogue with subordinate commanders, and not of information gleaned from doctrine, staff processes, 

and PowerPoint slides.

The Impulse to Learning, Adaptation, and Innovation

The environment facing commanders in OIF flipped the staff-centric 

paradigm on its head. Historically, this lesson has been learned before, 

with the stimulus often being resource scarcity, environmental constraints, 

or outright military defeat. British Field Marshal Sir William Slim learned 

this lesson in Burma while commanding the 14th Army of the British Indian Army fighting against Japan.5

 Slim claims the US military successfully 

adapted tactically in the Pacific in WWII in the context of ever increasing 

resources. Adaptation in this context was more in response to the enemy versus constrained resources.6

 Thus the greatest impulse to change, 

to evolve towards a learning organization is the commander after facing 

clear defeat.

Perhaps the only similarity with US forces operating in OIF and Slim’s 

forces in Burma and India is the relatively small size of experienced, quality forces operating within the larger backdrop of unfamiliar expanses of 

terrain against a threat both armies were not prepared initially to fight. The 

British Indian Army was organized and equipped mainly for internal security and aid to civil power duties within British India, unprepared in organization, leadership, training, and equipment to face the Imperial Japanese 

Army at the beginning of WWII.7 The US Army was unprepared in many 

ways to face an insurgency in Iraq, but this was perhaps largely a function 

of command leadership. Whereas the Indian Army was facing potential 
90

annihilation at the hands of the Japanese, the US Army was never at risk 

of being overrun or destroyed at the hands of insurgents.

Danger, whether experienced personally in fighting the enemy, or 

danger to one’s mission and forces born of command responsibility are 

powerful motivators to change, to learn and adapt.8 The amorphous, indirect enemy threat as seen in various forms in Iraq, while amplifying the 

complexity for units engaged in fighting, where soldiers were killed or 

wounded but units remained intact as fighting organizations, nonetheless 

may have proved incidental—if not distracting—to the larger campaign 

for units in contact. The violent menace shifts focus from the big mission—the operation or campaign objectives—to the tactical engagements 

of killing those that attempted to kill US soldiers. In that sense, the menace 

causes myopia and takes the attention away from the greater menace to 

the mission of establishing conditions for transition, such as the enemy’s 

population control infrastructure.9 Thus danger, in OIF, may have proved a 

distraction rather than a motivation to think differently on how to destroy 

the enemy’s infrastructure.

Slim’s introspective and self-critical memoir Defeat into Victory reflects not only his leadership and character, but also how catastrophe and 

danger to the mission can impel an army to adapt or die. That US forces 

learned and adapted, that some units proved to be learning organizations 

in Iraq, is more of a product of visionary leadership at various levels, and 

expression of internal operational art and thinking potential, rather than an 

external stimulus born of mission danger.

As compared to Slim’s forces in Burma, the only true resource limitation facing US forces in Iraq was the number of soldiers available in the 

fight. If scarcity and necessity are the mothers of innovation, then clearly US commanders and units often wanted for little outside of additional 

companies and battalions.10

The scarcity of other resources, particularly money for projects and 

reconstruction in Iraq, was a relatively late phenomenon, and in the end 

not necessarily viewed as detrimental by some commanders.11 Massive 

amounts of resources were, in general, always available to US forces in 

Iraq, ranging from money, material, and equipment for life support and 

military operations, as well as the rapid fielding of new technologies in response to insurgent adaptation. Large amounts of money for big projects, 

rather than serving as weapon systems in recent Army jargon, in fact often 

serve as a weapon of mass disruption and distraction, corrupting the local environment and destabilizing security efforts. In this environment of 
91

resource largesse, immersion and direct interaction in the COIN environment of Iraq, while an absolute requirement for situational understanding 

and achieving true progress, was highly subjective to the will and foresight 

of the commander. Due to the level or resources in Iraq and the size of 

military staffs, it is easy to see how a commander could view learning 

through the lens of manipulating staff processes and systems towards the 

optimization of process and efficiency in the allocation of resources.

Commanders, by choice, and staffs by default, could easily isolate 

themselves physically and cognitively from the operating environment 

without worrying about the overall mission consequences. Sometimes, 

due to the size of the areas, particularly as brigades assumed larger and 

larger areas, isolation and a lack of understanding was perhaps unavoidable, particularly the higher the echelon of command.12 Generally, the insurgent stood little chance of scoring a clear tactical defeat of US forces. 

Thus, success throughout the deployment could be defined through the 

eyes of US forces, without consideration of the environment or the enemy.

If commanders can choose isolation to suit preference and experience, 

then it is arguable that, in general, military staffs live in imposed isolation, 

by design and in reality. Many commanders have recognized this fact of 

war as seen in OIF. Some commanders took a variety of steps to ensure 

that limitations of the staff do not undermine effective mission command 

and impede operational progress.13 One former battalion commander in 

OIF comments:

I know doctrinally that campaigns are done at the operational 

level. In effect, battalions and companies have been doing campaign-type analysis, constructing a holistic approach that leads 

to greater mission accomplishment down the road, which I think 

you could define as a campaign. The way that you approach 

your staff processes will directly impact how you approach the 

campaign. If you don’t have an iterative approach to understanding, to what is going on, and you don’t have systems in place 

that create dialogue naturally, it just doesn’t happen on its own. 

You will be consumed by your battle rhythm and consumed by 

events. It is a conscious choice. The commander has to make a 

very deliberate choice and develop an approach that meets his 

intent. I would argue that the short train-ups have not prepared 

a lot of units for that kind of approach. We took a very deliberate approach. I kept re-focusing the staff and re-focusing the 

staff and had a very deliberate battle rhythm of dialogue, that 

forced the dialogue to occur. I think that if you don’t do that you 
92

can be overwhelmed by the staff battle rhythm, which trumps 

your dialogue. The way you organize your approach is critical 

to developing what you need. The typical large staff, especially 

at division level and above . . . it takes them three months to 

develop a plan, figure out what is going on and publish an order. 

Then they are done. They are riding out the rest of the year. If 

our decision cycle is one year, then we are clearly not agile or 

adaptive. So I think that you have to change your approach and 

make it much more design-focused. It has to be light, easily 

adaptable, and built into your battle rhythm.14

In OIF, the intuitive leadership born of inductive processes of the commander assumed primacy as a locus for dialogue and sense making, and 

developed over time through experience and better situational understanding engendered through direct interaction with the COIN environment. 

The rational-analytic approach manifested through staff processes and 

staff leadership isolated from the environment can at best only play a complementary role towards a better total synthesis.

All things being equal, it is arguable that the intuitive leadership of 

commanders operating under mission command, manifested in better approaches, tactics, and operations played the most important role in determining whether or not a unit could rightly earn the title of a learning organization. Many commanders recognized that the COIN environment in 

Iraq requires leaders with an ear to the ground in order to sense transition 

and emergences. The sensing, management, and seizing of transition and 

emergent opportunities is often a function of the collective intellect and 

intuition of commanders, an expression of the latent potential for operational art in the COIN environment, and not the product of military staff 

analytic and technical ability.

Leveraging the collective brainpower of leaders and commanders requires open dialogue towards a common and evolving narrative concerning the operating environment, trusting those with demonstrated skill and 

ability. This implies an inherent receptiveness to initiative and new ideas, 

and a willingness to take risk. The leadership climate of the command 

will ultimately shape how successfully the unit can harvest the experience, intellect, and intuition of subordinate commanders and leaders for 

the benefit of operational progress.15 If anything, recent wars in Iraq and 

Afghanistan closed the experience gap that existed between senior and junior leaders prior to the wars. Acknowledging this requires the recognition 

of the limitation of individual commanders to retain a firm grasp of the 

operating environment, and necessitates perhaps humility of intellect and 
93

a clear rejection of overly sycophantic leadership culture that undermines 

open and frank dialogue between commanders.16 Perhaps the US Army 

could learn from the British Army in this regard.17

Large military staffs, such as those seen the MNC-I and MNF/USF-I 

levels, may have proved unable to see the operational environment through 

the lens of commanders conducting combat operations at lower echelons. 

This lack of a common perspective can actually increase operational risk, 

particularly if guidance is issued that is contrary to the mission requirements of the commanders trying to reconcile operational approaches to 

fighting to what the environment requires and allows. Military staffs in 

isolation may prove deaf to the input of subordinate units and commanders, particularly concerning operational guidance or directives that attempt 

to strictly circumscribe the actions of subordinate units. Two operations 

serve to highlight this problem.

The coalition forces support for the first elections in Iraq in January 

2005 was delineated and circumscribed under Operation Seeds of Liberty, published by MNC-I in late 2004. coalition forces were relegated to 

planning for the provision of outer cordon and quick reaction force (QRF) 

missions. The rest of the election support, ranging from the guarding and 

operation of polling sites, as well as arranging for logistical support to 

elections activities was to be the responsibility of the Independent Electoral Commission Iraq, or IECI. From October 2004 to early January 2005, 

coalition forces planned under the assumption that IECI, with ISF support, 

would take the lead role. Strategically, the greatest risk to Operation Seeds 

of Liberty, as seen by LTG Thomas Metz, the MNC-I at the time, was Iraq 

version of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.18 Anecdotally, another major strategic risk factor was the taint of possible election manipulation by US and 

Coalition Force partners.19

The actual risk, at least in the view of units at the tactical level, became 

manifest less than two weeks prior to the election, when it was clear that 

the IECI, at least in the context of Salah ad Din province, was incapable of 

planning, organizing, or executing the elections without tremendous support from coalition forces. In essence, MNC-I guidance hamstrung units 

towards planning for incidental support to a critical mission, based on the 

assumption that mission failure centered not on the ability of the IECI to 

execute the election, but rather on an informational disaster indicating US 

manipulation of the election. This, in essence, precluded planning for the 

resource intensive support ultimately provided by US forces in response 

to IECI false promises. Only the tremendous and tireless efforts consisting 

of last-minute crisis planning and tasking of subordinate units by coalition 
94

forces ensured that the election actually happened. Whether or not MNC-I 

learned any salient lessons from this event is unclear.20

Another more recent example concerned the implementation of the 

Iraq-US Security Agreement that took effect in June 2009. The Security 

Agreement, in essence, was a revisit to the transition strategy that took a 

backseat during the surge in 2007 and 2008. The initial part of the Security 

Agreement signified a pull out of US forces outside of cities, ostensibly 

to larger FOBs, and an end to US-only operations. The formal end of US 

combat operations occurred on 1 September 2010, with the redeployment of 

the last US combat brigade to Kuwait. Concurrently from the beginning of 

the Security Agreement, the footprint of US combat outpost and small base 

infrastructure would decrease apace with the withdrawal of US forces.

The mission requirements for US forces did not decrease during this 

period however, particularly as unit areas of responsibility increased exponentially. The mission of US Army units deploying to Iraq in late 2008 

through 2009 was primarily to build and develop the capability and capacity of ISF and government officials towards the stabilization of Iraq. 

While this may have been the mission of US forces at the brigade level 

and below, it is not clear that higher-level staffs at MNC-I and MNF-I 

retained the same focus. The way the Security Agreement was promoted 

at the national level by USF-I gave the impression that civilians would 

no longer see US forces on Iraq streets, which proved false.21 For many 

units the tempo of operations actually increased, as well as the dispersal 

of US combat forces to remote locations, living in and amongst the ISF.22

Commanders were forced to devise innovative ways to get around restrictions in order to achieve stability goals in the wake of security gains made 

during the surge.23

From the perspective of some commanders operating under the Security Agreement, the main effort in partnering with and building the capacity of the ISF and government of Iraq was subject to disruption and reactionary decisions by higher commanders and staffs. The major effort of 

corps-level staff appeared to focus on the breakdown of outposts and thus 

decreasing the presence of US units on the street. If successful, the mission 

as assigned to units partnered with the ISF would have been undermined.24

The strategic, yet ultimately administrative requirements of the responsible redeployment of forces, or RRF, appeared to supplant the operational 

and tactical requirements of forces conducting partnered stability operations in the Iraqi provinces, whether deployed as a regular Army BCT or as 

a BCT configured as an Advise and Assist Brigade (AAB).25 Reactionary 

decisions by senior commanders, resulting in the wholesale re-tasking of 
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entire units partnering with ISF also had the same effect.26 At this point in 

the campaign, however, Army units and commanders harvested the benefits of years of learning and adapting in Iraq by innovating, reorganizing forces, and adapting at levels perhaps unseen when the availability of 

forces and resources were far greater.27 Scarcity served to spur innovation.

Whether or not large staffs in the US military tradition as seen in OIF 

could adequately adapt to the requirements of the COIN environment remains unclear, particularly when policy and strategy do not mesh clearly 

with operational and tactical requirements. Understanding the nature of 

learning organizations in the context of OIF, how they innovated and adapted, requires divorcing the art of command and command leadership from 

any technical or doctrine-centric perspective. If anything, the war in Iraq 

demonstrated that absolute critical role the commander plays, from the combat arms company commander to the brigade combat team commander.

Command Leadership and Climate: The Keystone of the 

Learning Organization

In OIF the worldview of the various echelons of staff often differed 

significantly from that of commanders. In the context of subordinate commanders and units operating under the staff of a higher commander, the 

subordinate commander may be forced to act outside of the directives of 

orders from higher echelons. This spectrum of deviance in OIF extended 

from decisions made with no delegated authority to actually ignoring directives in extreme circumstances, where the execution of an ostensibly 

lawful order would prove contrary to progress.28 In some cases, such as 

the Anbar Awakening in 2006, higher headquarters were effectively dealt a 

fait accompli, where there appeared no other sensible option but for higher 

commanders and staffs to embrace what a lower commander has initiated.

The claim that command leadership played the central role in achieving security and stability gains in Iraq is certainly uncontroversial, if not 

overly simplistic. Command leadership is central in all war. Uniquely, for 

an Army that has roots in Western military thought, both in Clausewitz and 

de Jomini, good commanders often demonstrated traits more in line with 

Sun Tzu and ancient Chinese military thought.29 Reconciling the military 

science bias of Army tradition—a bias that can give the impression that 

it is possible to lift the fog and minimize the friction of war through better processes—towards an approach that clearly understands the limits of 

knowledge, control, and understanding, is truly the art of command and 

the sole charge of the commander. The art of command in COIN is demonstrated through operational art and thinking in practice.
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Thus the commander is key to unlocking the latent talent within the 

unit, talent that learns, adapts, and innovates in war, to the true emancipation of the learning organization from a tendency towards internal fixation. 

Highlighting some traits or characteristics of good commanders, considered in general as well as informed through interviews of former OIF commanders, can serve to inform broadly as to how learning organizations 

formed. More importantly, perhaps, the descriptive history of OIF as described through the eyes of commanders at the brigade level and below 

can serve to re-center military thought and professional military education 

more on military history and the art of command.

Commander Traits and the Learning Organization

The nature of the COIN environment in OIF and its granular characteristics proved highly particular and complex, from town to town, urban 

to rural, mulhalla to mulhalla as seen in Baghdad, from neighborhood to 

neighborhood. Overlaying the environment, the human terrain and its taxonomic complexity in social-economic, familial, tribal, ethnic, and religious variables added perhaps a virtually infinite number of permutations 

to problems that serve to thwart even the most sophisticated modeling or 

problem solving process. For the commander attempting to use combat 

power and available resources to address problems as they arose, gaining a 

better understanding of the environment was perhaps the most important, 

difficult, and continual challenge of command leadership in organizations 

often wedded to particular problem solving techniques and technological 

solutions. Thus intuitive leadership, informed through deep personal and 

concrete experience and inductive reasoning, through interaction with the 

environment and the enemy, may prove superior to a rational-analytical 

approach to decision-making and leadership.

Arguably, intuitive command leadership in OIF led to certain organizational traits roughly characterized as flexibility in the face of the enemy 

and circumstance, adaptive and changing methods of operations and organization, and at times an artful use of deception and trickery; all within 

the context of winning with an economy of force. The mission compelled 

commanders and forces to embed deeper within the terrain and environment of Iraq in order to address the reality of the COIN environment on 

its own terms. But intuitive leadership is arguably a product of personal 

experience and subject to various biases. The right kind of intuitive leadership is the manifestation of particularly good traits or characteristics of 

the commander, traits that force the commander to recognize the limits of 

knowledge and understanding and address bias when it is recognized. The 

demonstrated potential for operational art in commanders and units was 
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both a product of experiential learning while in contact and a preexisting 

potential informed by learning habits and personal traits.

Such traits include self-awareness, intellectual humility, and empathy, and can be roughly characterized as leadership virtues. While some 

commanders may be innately endowed with such traits, it is arguable that 

these traits are from universally distributed within hierarchical military 

organizations. Leaders endowed with command authority may just as easily possess, without career consequence, the traits of egotism, self-importance, and intellectual hubris. Additionally, leaders simply cannot claim 

to become self-aware, intellectually humble, and empathetic when necessity demands. These leadership virtues can be developed cognitively 

over time, as a product of education and experience. The detailed study 

of military history may lend to the development of intellectual humility, 

as the more history it informs the more questions it can generate. The 

practitioner faces the problem of study and reflection in the context of the 

duties and responsibilities associated with officer leadership, of turning 

ideas into action. Thus, detailed study ought to lead the practitioner to intellectual humility, perhaps more so than the academic who does not retain 

such responsibility.

The idea that empathy is a virtue of the counterinsurgent is not uncommon. Mark Moyar highlights empathy as one of the ten critical traits 

of the counterinsurgent.30 A common definition defines empathy as “the 

action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of 

either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated.”31 Empathy represents the potential for 

vicarious learning, which is critical for command leadership. Empathy, 

along with compassion and kindness, are also described as weapons of 

the counterinsurgent in FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency.

32 Empathy is also 

described in Army leadership doctrine, FM 6-22, as “The ability to see 

something from another person’s point of view, to identify with and enter 

into another person’s feelings and emotions.”33 One Army officer writing 

on empathy in irregular warfare advocates operationalizing empathy in the 

form of a normative principle, in this case the Golden Rule, as a precursor 

to legitimacy vis-à-vis the local population.34 There are several problems 

with the understanding of empathy as a trait or ability that FM 3-24 fails 

to consider, which may serve to undercut its usefulness. Equating empathy 

and compassion to weapons gives the impression that both are means to 

be applied to an end. They are not. Empathy is a trait, or a characteristic of 

an individual. Compassion is a controlling emotional force, one predicat-
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ed on a compelling emotion to act and alleviate suffering.35 Furthermore, 

compassion is often not viewed as virtuous, particularly as it has roots in 

pity and shared suffering. The benefit of empathy is that it serves as an aid 

to learning and reflection, and as such arguably increases the potential for 

operational thinking and art in commanders.

Empathy is useless, and in effect has no basis, without the contextual 

understanding that the study of history provides. Additionally, the overuse 

of TTPs, lessons learned, and other such methods in developing skill in 

warfare arguably ignore empathy. For commanders, this is especially superficial and dangerous. In essence, TTPs and lessons learned approaches 

to learning focus on the action, or what units did to achieve a positive outcome. However, commanders must focus on what other commanders were 

thinking, trying to logically integrate the impacts of the various contexts of 

the period had on decision making. The study of military history can help 

provide the contexts. Thus, if a commander can better understand what a 

historical commander was thinking, then we could better assess actions in 

context towards the purposes of reflection and aiding in making our own 

decisions. Empathy is thus a product of education and not indoctrination, 

through the deep contextual understanding that the study of history provides. The qualitative moral assessment of leader thinking and actions is 

arguably only possible through empathy, and not through a process that 

evaluates the quality of action through its outcome. Simply put, just because a unit won an engagement does not mean that it was due to the quality of the commander. Friction and chance may have provided the means 

to victory more so than the thinking and decisions of the commander.

Arguing that empathy, or any other trait can be actualized through 

the use of normative tools such as the Golden Rule oversimplifies the 

difficulty in actually acquiring such traits. Something as simple as the 

Golden Rule, or in the case of the Army, the Army Values, the Warrior 

Ethos, etc., presumes that they are effective in achieving a better outcome.36 In the case of the Army, the outcome is morally superior leaders 

and soldiers. In relationship to cause and effect, there is perhaps little 

evidence to confirm this presumption, despite the continual efforts to 

select the right ethos or values.37

Simplistic tools do not serve to lend an intellectual hand to the complex, difficult, and unique situations that commanders often face in war.38

Such tools may prove sufficient in describing and shaping conduct within 

a garrison environment, in relation to shaping obligations to others within 

the organization, but may prove relatively useless in war when the obligations of the commander extend beyond an internal, organizational fixation, 
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and extend to the people where the organization is conducting military 

operations.

Empathy fundamentally requires a deep desire to learn and understand, a 

desire that is coupled with no rigid adherence to fixed opinion or idea. Closely 

tied to empathy is humility. In ancient Greek thought, humility is the opposite 

of hubris, and is closely tied to respect, often manifested in a willingness to listen and take counsel in the opinions of others.39 Humility ought to be a product 

of education as well. For the military practitioner as student of the profession 

of arms, it means that commanders of the past faced problems as complex as 

those of today, that I am not special. Hubris thus serves no purpose than to 

narrow perspective and limit the potential of vicarious learning.

In war, this implies that a commander, consciously or unconsciously, sees a virtue in being wrong, to the extent that being wrong leads to 

better ideas and actions before the crisis of military defeat destroys fixed 

perspectives and compels a different approach. Empathy is the result of 

becoming self-aware of the limitations of one’s knowledge and experience, through the exposure of the one’s mind, ideas, bias, and worldviews 

to substantive critique that forces reflection and introspection. Exposing 

one’s deeply held ideas or beliefs to critique can force a mental and emotional reckoning with intellectual error. Once this reckoning occurs, the 

virtue of being wrong results in intellectual humility that opens the mind 

to the ideas of others, to the potential of vicarious learning.

Self-awareness enables knowing one’s own ability and limitations, of 

seeing oneself in the broader context of the environment. Intellectual humility recognizes the limits of knowledge, experience, and understanding. 

Empathy enables knowing one’s enemies. Thus, gaining command leadership endowed with these leadership virtues is indispensible in all war. In 

OIF, and perhaps all COIN fighting, where force often remains in relative 

economy, self-awareness, intellectual humility, and empathy are perhaps 

the sine qua non of effective command leadership. In COIN, the necessity 

of command leadership endowed with these particular leadership virtues 

may be greater, as clear distinctions between the enemy and non-combatants are far from clear as compared to other forms of warfare and experience in a more traditional or conventional war context. A commander in 

this environment, in order to gain contact with the enemy, to remain in 

cognitive and physical interaction with the enemy, requires a deep understanding of the environment, one that can only come through daily close 

contact with the enemy and the population. The artificial environment of 

the TOC may simply serve to project a US-centric interpretation of reality, 

one that exists as a function of choosing to remain cognitively isolated 
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from the environment.40 In choosing to remain isolated, however, the commander is ultimately undermining the mission and serving the interests of 

the enemy. In conventional war, isolation precedes defeat and destruction. 

In COIN warfare as seen in OIF, cognitive isolation preceded operational 

and tactical mediocrity or failure and inhibited initiative, but not tactical 

defeat or physical destruction, which is perhaps why few commanders in 

OIF were relieved for incompetence.41

Despite efforts to create simple and concise statements that circumscribe 

a professional military ethic, there is no tool, aphorism, mnemonic, heuristic, etc., that can lead to anything other than superficial claims of the utility 

of such tools. However, theory is study as Clausewitz claims, and study 

centers on military history. There is no short cut to personal development 

towards a talent for war than rigorous, accountable study of military history 

followed by experience, and thus there is not potential for operational art 

and thinking without a habit for the disciplined study of military history.

In the context of developing the potential for operational art, in developing empathy, self-awareness, and intellectual humility, attempting to actualize 

these virtues as tools is invariably useless. Rather than tools to be applied or 

used when required, these virtues are the character traits of the commander, 

inseparable from effective command. If empathy, self awareness, and intellectual humility are difficult character traits to acquire, and not simply instrumental means to be summoned at will or used when necessary, then it follows that 

they are neither tools to be wielded when needed nor amenable to attempts to 

indoctrinate them into being or existing in the character of a military organization through the use of internally focused institutional values.

Learning in Action: One Common Thread

While the actions and decisions commanders made in OIF to address 

complex problems vary widely in innovative quality, one common thread 

appears throughout the interviews. Personal interaction is often central 

to effective learning. Instead of relying on rational-analytical decision 

making processes informed by abstract empirical information, many commanders chose to develop intuitive understanding through constant dialogue and interaction with a variety of actors in the COIN environment. 

Environmental interaction serves as the contextual basis for demonstrating 

operational art and thinking, for adapting military systems and integrating 

them into the environment to achieve a more desirable set of conditions.42

The primary means that most commanders used to gain intuitive understanding, to reorient thinking in contact while in Iraq was constant 

battlefield presence and circulation, tied to continual dialogue with all 
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stakeholders, including subordinate commanders and leaders, ISF and 

civil leaders, regular civilians on the street, and at times insurgent leaders.43 This placed a tremendous physical and intellectual burden on the 

commander, but afforded simultaneously a broad, deep, and particular 

perspective that can lead to keen insight and cognitive shift away from 

a organizational-centric frame of reference—the culture of the BUA—to 

one more aligned with the environmental reality.

History and Clausewitz teaches us that the feelings and effects of danger 

and courage in war are unavoidable. In the context of commanders at the 

brigade level and below in OIF, changes to thinking did not occur due to losing a tactical fight. Tactical defeat of US forces due to the violent efforts of 

insurgents never occurred. The enemy killed US soldiers, but did not destroy 

whole units. The risk to the mission born of tactical defeat appeared fleeting. Thus, the aspect of courage centers on the moral factors of accepting 

responsibility for both the mission and lives of soldiers, where the mission 

did not appear at risk but where soldiers still died. This could overemphasize the importance of the limited and incidental means of the insurgents.44

Violence, fighting, and danger, all sources of friction in war that forces commanders to learn and adapt, or risk death and defeat, were all incidental in 

the lethal interaction between US forces and the enemy. Stated simply, the 

enemy could not impose defeat, so there was no overwhelming impetus to 

drastically change. Tactics, techniques, and procedures certainly changed 

throughout OIF, but TTP changes are marginal changes that often only deal 

with the immediate tactical and lethal interplay between the enemy and US 

forces.45 Orientation on tactics, however, has little to do with operational art.

The choice to place emphasis on learning through presence and dialogue indirectly indicates that some commanders were either innately endowed with the potential for operational thinking and art born of critical 

self-awareness, intellectual humility, and empathy, or developed the potential over time through experience, education, introspection, and reflection. Regardless of how commanders developed these traits, it represents 

a personal victory over an Army tradition that doctrinally emphasizes 

staff-intensive and process-centric rational-analytic decision-making processes, and that while emphasizing the necessity of certain traits, fails in 

describing how to develop them in future commanders.

Mission Command in OIF or Simply an 

Environment of Autonomy?

Interviews of OIF commanders that led forces in OIF indicate that to 

various extents, many commanders either possessed or developed the ca-
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pacity for operational art and thinking, which proved essential to organizational learning, adapting, and innovation. Some commanders, particularly 

at the brigade level and below, chose to face the COIN environment of Iraq 

more on its own terms than simply attempting to impose their own view 

of the problems on subordinate commanders. Mission command, while 

certainly requiring an atmosphere of trust between superior and subordinate commanders, is not inherently good in its own right, nor is trust. 

Trust must be earned and is demonstrated through competence, which requires education and development. Thus, we can state that while mission 

command was demonstrated in Iraq, it only retains moral worth when the 

subordinate commander has earned the trust demonstrated through competence. Rather than frame the environment of Iraq as an environment of 

mission command, it is perhaps more worthwhile to frame it under the 

idea of moral autonomy.

Moral autonomy, manifested in choice, is critical to understanding 

why particular leadership virtues are essential traits for the commander. 

In OIF, commanders often faced no motivation to see things differently 

as a function of external factors that would compel different approaches 

to gaining situational understanding. Specifically, since US forces never 

truly faced the threat of tactical defeat at the hands of the insurgent groups, 

the insurgency could never truly compel a commander to change in the 

face of tactical crisis. Furthermore, commanders rarely, if ever, felt compelled via directive from higher echelons to adjust thinking or problem 

understanding. How the commander chose to gain understanding, and thus 

shape the understanding of the staff, was at its most basic a function of the 

commander’s character and ability.

Some may argue that such a choice simply represents different forms 

of problem solving, that—assuming the right problem is identified—it is 

a function of actualizing the right model or methodology, of seeking efficiencies within processes. If it were that simple, then solving problems is 

hypothetically a matter that involves choosing the right problem solving 

methodology, whether it is MDMP or something else. While elegant, this 

fails to consider how the experiences, culture, beliefs, biases, and worldview of the actor making the choice come to predetermine approaches. In 

the context of US Army commanders, the problem of choice is actually a 

problem of the internal struggle and self-assessment that occurs within the 

commander. The commander either chooses, or does not choose, to struggle with his own beliefs and understanding, challenge his assumptions and 

worldview, and address inconsistencies. Choosing to address inconsistency is perhaps the purest demonstration of moral courage, and much hard-
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er than simply demonstrating physical courage, which involves placing 

oneself in harm’s way, such as in going on patrol with one’s subordinates.

Many commanders at the brigade level and below did, in the course of 

addressing the tactical and operational problems they faced in OIF, choose 

to fight with their own beliefs, bias, and worldviews on a continual basis.46

This choice—perhaps the fundamental first step—ultimately led to many 

unique and innovative methods and operations particularized in time and 

location. This moral autonomy manifested in choice is a demonstration of 

moral courage and does not preclude a general categorization of leadership styles and traits that can serve to broadly describe how commanders 

came to lead the way they did. The latent potential of operational art and 

thinking was seen in action through commanders that chose to immerse 

their minds in the local problems they faced to address the drivers of instability. While cognizant of the strategy and intent that broadly shaped 

campaign objectives, good commanders constantly sought to define, redefine, and reframe problems, through incorporating the perspectives of 

many and diverse sources of information, including all parties in the COIN 

environment of Iraq, even insurgents. Commanders sought direct personal 

contact on a daily basis with the messiness of the COIN environment in 

Iraq, personal interaction and dialogue to place events and perception into 

context, and a continual willingness to invest time and energy towards the 

critiquing their intent, previous assumptions, ideas, and approaches.

Personal interaction with subordinate commanders exposed the more 

senior leader to the insight and ideas of leaders with more direct and concrete experience in the operating environment and fostered an environment 

of open and frank dialogue broadly characterized as a positive command 

climate. This environment of dialogue and inquisitiveness strengthens the 

bonds of mutual respect between senior and subordinate. The potential 

for operational art expanded as commanders demonstrated the power of a 

good command climate by expanding the dialogue.

The proper command climate preceded operational art and stemmed 

directly from reasonably self-aware, empathetic, and intellectually humble commanders. Command and leadership climate were arguably the 

most important antecedent conditions that enabled commanders and 

units to learn and adapt effectively in OIF, and thus effectively demonstrate the latent potential of operational art that existed in the organization. Units, in essence, truly became learning organizations, where learning went far beyond the adjustment of TTPs in the face of an adapting 

and lethal enemy. In gaining a good understanding of the environment in 

OIF, commanders often faced difficult conditions with significant moral 
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considerations, particularly regarding the effects of military operations 

on the local population.

Environmental Truths in OIF: Reconciling Inconsistency

in Belief and Practice

Perhaps the first hard truth is that COIN force is not simply an external 

actor that simply decides to do things or impose its will, albeit with good 

intentions, but an actor whose very presence changes the environment, for 

better or worse. The COIN force is not inherently moral or good because 

it believes it is such, and this claim exists regardless of the emotions and 

pride any commander feels for the forces he or she commands and suffers 

with.47 Recognizing this can lead to a better understanding of the environment and the role that the US forces in OIF—an occupying and foreign 

force—actually played in an alien Iraqi society not apt to view the actions 

of US forces as good or beneficial. In other words, empathy is a prelude 

to self-critique and more effective leadership and military operations, and 

thus also a critical factor in operational art.

Commanders were no longer automatically convinced of the virtues of their efforts when seeing things through the eyes of Iraqis. Selfaware, intellectually humble, and empathetic commanders are perhaps 

more attuned to inconsistency when it arises between belief, perception, 

and facts. Addressing this cognitive inconsistency in a truthful way may 

lead to commanders taking quite radical, innovative, and risky actions to 

place the actions and operations of the COIN force on a path that leads 

towards stability, security, and progress. This also places the commander 

and unit in the position to sense and take advantage of emergencies and 

transitions. Events in Anbar in 2005-2006 and in Baghdad in 2006-2007 

serve to highlight local emergencies within the Sunni populations and 

the actions several commanders took to achieve better local stability at 

the expense of the insurgency.

The political isolation of the Sunni population was directly attributable to the decisions made in 2003 by the Coalition Provisional Authority 

to disband the former Iraqi Army and institute strict measures that denied 

many former Ba’ath Party members both political participation and access 

to government resources and jobs in the new Iraq. The torture and abuse 

of prisoners at Abu Ghraib reinforced this perception. Even necessary 

operations, particularly the attack and reduction of the Sunni insurgent 

stronghold of Fallujah in late 2004 by coalition forces, served to further 

entrench the perception of the Sunnis. Broadly speaking, coalition forces 

were perceived as de facto proxies of Shia and Iranian interests, bent on 
105

destroying the Sunni population of Iraq. Various Sunni groups, ranging 

from Arab nationalists to Al Qaeda terrorists and foreign fighters, could 

easily coalesce around a common perception of injustice, fear, marginalization, and weakness to attack a common group of enemies, to include 

coalition forces and all state apparatuses of the new Government of Iraq. 

In essence, US forces and strategy caused the insurgency. In order to defeat the insurgency at the local level and achieve stability, commanders at 

the brigade level and below would have to recognize the US and CF role 

in creating and motivating the insurgency, not only broadly, but also in 

depth at a local level. Understanding affords taking advantage of opportunities, or emergences, as they arise. A simplistic understanding of the enemy that fails to consider individual or group motivations can drive poorly 

informed insurgent targeting and operations.

The Anbar Awakening is a well-known example of an emergence that 

led to a dramatic transition in the security environment. The event is often mischaracterized as an effect of the surge, or an event isolated to Al 

Anbar, independent of the surge and separate in context with the beginnings of the Sons of Iraq movement in Baghdad in 2007. Both arguments 

are demonstrably false. The Awakening movement was heavily supported 

by US forces from the beginning, where several USMC battalion commanders aided and supported their former Sunni insurgent adversaries in 

their efforts to rid Al Qaim of Al Qaeda forces.48 Following the Marines, 

a US Army brigade combat team directly supported the Anbar Awakening 

that began in the summer of 2006 under Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha. 

The movement, considered in its entirety, was supported and shepherded 

from forward thinking Marine Corps and Army brigade and battalion commanders from their inception. Arguably, without this support most if not 

all local movements would wither and die in their infancy.

The commanders that experienced the emergence of internecine fighting amongst erstwhile allies, between Al Qaeda and particular tribes, and 

between feuding tribes sensed an emergence that portended a transition, 

or perhaps return towards traditional stability in Al Anbar. This emergence 

provided visionary commanders an operational point of leverage and initiative to align the military campaign with environmental trends, to rethink 

operations and take new approaches to solidify advantage. Some commanders and units saw internecine fighting as good, simply because the 

insurgents were fighting and killing themselves.49 Arguably, at levels higher than the brigade, few if any commanders or staff members sensed what 

was actually happening in Anbar in late summer 2006.50 Indeed, the famous leaked intelligence assessment published in September 2006, claim-
106

ing that Anbar is lost, conflicted clearly with the assessment of brigade and 

battalion commanders on the ground.51 Commanders that had supported 

the evolving Awakening movement that began in Al Qaim in 2005 can 

rightly claim that they did so with little or no guidance, and sometimes 

without support from more senior commanders and staff.52

The Sons of Iraq program that began in early 2007 under a variety 

of different titles in Ghaziliyah and Ameriyah neighborhoods in West 

Baghdad had direct ties to members of the Awakening movement in Anbar, including the Abu Risha tribe.53 The brigade commander for Western 

Baghdad at the time stated the program that would later be titled the Sons 

of Iraq was born out of the desires of local Sunni leaders in several West 

Baghdad neighborhoods to counteract the effects of the campaign of exhaustion being waged on Sunnis by Shia militias, Iraqi Security Forces, 

and the Government of Iraq.54 At its most basic, the Sons of Iraq movement began as a quest for simple justice and fairness for an increasingly 

beleaguered Sunni minority.

Sunni neighborhoods wanted the ability to secure their own areas with 

forces often characterized as armed neighborhood watches. However, US 

commanders were not allowed to create or arm such forces.55 Arming a 

neighborhood watch, particularly ones in Sunni neighborhoods, could be 

conflated as a threat to the legitimate government of Iraq and the ISF. Seen 

from a Sunni perspective, US forces, rather than contributing to security 

and stability, were enabling the sectarian cleansing efforts of certain Shia 

politicians, ISF leaders, and militias. Empathy enables the commander to 

see this, and it quickly becomes clear that the path toward progress in such 

an environment will force the commander to deal with the inconsistency of trying to support legitimate governance and security efforts while 

enabling its sectarian proclivities by denying a minority population the 

ability to secure itself.

Dealing with the operational inconsistency of supporting the ISF and 

GoI without at the same time enabling sectarianism forced reflective commanders to assume risk and take innovative approaches to address the 

problems in the security environment, problems that required operational 

art and thinking. The local security programs as manifested broadly in 

the Sons of Iraq program was one approach among other complementary 

efforts in West Baghdad in 2007.

Another major effort complementary to the Sons of Iraq program, initiated at the brigade level, sought to expose and ultimately defeat the most 

egregious component of sectarian injustice, namely the official corruption 
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and criminality of government officials and ISF leaders that operated below the surface in Baghdad in promotion of sectarian interests. Tolerance 

of corruption, at least regarding Western norms and tradition, is often seen 

as unavoidable in Iraq, and the Middle East in general, due to culture and 

tradition.56 A commander in OIF could certainly appease his internal moral compass regarding corruption and appeal to T. E. Lawrence’s fifteenth 

article by arguing that it is better to let the Iraqis do it tolerably well than 

for US forces to do it perfectly.57 But this appeal to simple aphorism fails 

when official corruption succors the roots of insurgency.58 In the context 

of Baghdad in 2007, a reflective commander saw clearly that official corruption and criminality, in the form of kidnapping, extortion, murder, and 

resource denial were a threat not only to Sunnis, but also to the mission in 

general.

Operationalizing efforts to counter official corruption and criminality 

in Baghdad came with significant risks that extend to the highest levels of 

politico-military authority and partnership, as both Iraqi and US. Army 

units conducting COIN could not simply target, detain, and imprison corrupt officials as required, as the GoI retained veto authority on the arrest 

and detention of officials.

One brigade designed a particularly innovative and successful operation that directly and indirectly attacked official corruption in the GoI and 

ISF, titled Operation Seventh Veil. As described by the brigade commander, the purpose of the operation was to “remove all protective coverings 

from Iraqi governmental officials, Iraqi military leaders, deny them the 

protection afforded them by their position or their duties, and then hold 

them accountable for anything that they had done wrong. It was to defeat 

complicity inside the ranks of the Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi political leadership.”59

The brigade leveraged its organic capabilities to collect intelligence 

and conduct formal investigations to build dossiers on corrupt officials. 

The dossiers were then used as a leverage point to either force a corrupt 

official to confront, account for, and modify his behavior, or as a way to 

gain the authority, via senior US and Iraqi channels, to detain and remove 

bad actors.60 This type of leverage created opportunities and enhanced the 

efficiency of combat organizations to effect transition of the security environment to more favorable conditions, towards a stasis more broadly in 

line with strategic objectives.

Developed at the brigade level, Operation Seventh Veil quickly gained 

support from senior commanders, including the MNF-I commander, Gen-
108

eral Petraeus.61 The immediate tangible benefit to this anti-corruption effort was to restore, at least partially, the public perception on the efficacy 

of the rule of law. Concerning the efforts to combat the insurgency and 

militia gangsters, the operation exposed and cut off the official-backed ratlines that simultaneously supported sectarian violence and attacks against 

US forces.62 More than simply a desirable end, decreasing official corruption proved inseparable from pursuing COIN campaign progress, to improving local security and stability, and also for preserving the lives of US 

soldiers. Operation Seventh Veil was clearly among the most innovative 

operations initiated in Iraq from 2006 through 2008, and clearly demonstrated the power and necessity of operational art and thinking at the BCT 

level and below.

Operationalizing the Learning Organization:

Deviance and Innovation

Arguably, within the experience of US forces in OIF, events and operations such as the Anbar Awakening, the Sons of Iraq movement, and Operation Seventh Veil will always start through the initiative and leadership 

of officers at the brigade level and below. Brigade, battalion, and company 

commanders, within their scope of their responsibilities and their proximity to the COIN environment, are well placed to sense emergences and 

take advantage of transitions. All other factors being equal, the primary 

and perhaps predetermining factor on whether or not a unit will be able 

to sense emergences and take advantage of transitions is the quality and 

character of the commander, a commander endowed with a capacity for 

operational art and thinking often informed by leadership traits such as 

self-awareness, intellectual humility, and empathy.

Such traits are not sufficient, however, as they are not decisions or 

tools. They do not compel action or change, but may enable the commander to sense or see the necessity of change. Additionally, acting on an 

idea, especially one that has no clear approval or protection from higher 

commanders and staffs is always risky, particularly when the enemy cannot force your defeat. The maintenance of the status quo, perhaps the low 

risk option and a product of short-term thinking, remained very tempting 

in the context of OIF. Thus, a commander may understand the problems 

in his sector, but may ultimately determine that addressing the problems, 

as they exist, entails too much risk to merit the consideration of anything 

other than marginal operational changes. The decision to act innovatively 

and perhaps radically to seize the initiative has an immediate disincentive 

due to the consequences of failure, whereas maintaining the status quo in 
109

the OIF operating environment often entailed little overt risk, as the status 

quo is already de facto sanctioned by political and military authority.

The exercise of command authority as seen in the context of OIF, in 

the expression of autonomy manifested in adaptive and innovative operations that have no clear hierarchical sanction or approval, is perhaps 

the highest expression of operational art. Simply put, when commanders 

endowed with operational thinking, with traits such as self-awareness, intellectual humility, and empathy, combined with the moral courage to take 

responsibility decided to do things differently, the learning organization 

could adapt, take risk, and pursue innovative approaches. Commanders 

could morally justify innovative and perhaps deviant approaches to operations without clear guidance, and perhaps did not seek guidance, as they 

knew such innovation would be killed when subjected to staff analysis 

and critique at the division level and higher. In essence, commanders and 

their subordinate units demonstrated positive ethical deviance, a deviance 

born of operational art and thinking and a sense of moral responsibility 

to improve the security environment.63 Whereas arbitrary deviance is the 

antithesis of effective military operations and hierarchical control, positive 

ethical deviance is perhaps the ultimate expression of the potential for 

operational art under mission command in OIF. But good leadership in 

combat organizations fundamentally requires the right type of unit to pursue towards the pursuit of innovative approaches fundamentally requires 

organizations with a high-level of basic fighting competence. Organizations that exist to fight must learn to fight first, and demonstrate that basic 

competence in training.

The Fundamental Requirement for Tactical Organizations in 

COIN: Basic Fighting Competence

The argument for basic fighting competence in organizations designed 

and preparing for war is hardly revolutionary. Concerning the preparation and training for units deploying to Iraq in support of OIF, much has 

been written on the training of particularly COIN tactics and for devoting training time to specialization and regionally focused requirements, 

at the expense of more conventional, fire and maneuver oriented training 

against an organized and well-equipped enemy.64 Some argue for a complete adjustment to standard army organizations, either pre-deployment or 

doctrinally towards a force better organized and suited for low-intensity 

warfare and COIN.65 The underlying assumption is that conventional military combat organizations, trained to fight near-peer threats, are unsuited 

for low-intensity conflict and COIN. In fact, some claim that as COIN is 

the graduate level of warfare, commanders that can command in COIN 
110

can do so in high-intensity conflict.66 History may lend support to that 

argument, but it also lends support to its counterargument: military forces, 

and commanders, trained solely for countering insurgency and subversion 

may prove ill-equipped to fighting conventional adversaries.67

This poses a huge challenge for the relatively small, but tremendously expensive professional military of the US, particularly the forces 

of the US Army. On the one hand, deliberately organizing, training, and 

equipping forces specifically for low-intensity warfare, including COIN, 

may make sense when considering recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the other hand, to the extent that fighting such wars are 

less a strategic US imperative and more a problem of mission-creep born 

of a lack of true strategy, such wars have proven tremendously expensive 

in operational costs and expose the fragility of the all-volunteer force 

that is perpetually at war. Thus, creating Army brigades specifically tailored to fight low-intensity war may actually make less sense strategically, as it may entail more costly and unsustainable overseas adventures 

with indeterminate ends. This also includes the idea of creating large 

corps of military advisors to assist the developing of host nation security 

forces in conflict areas, particularly when those advisors are themselves 

involved in fighting, as seen in Vietnam prior to 1965. Advisory efforts 

can rapidly escalate to full-scale intervention, again threatening the viability of an all-volunteer army and exposing the nation to fiscal risk for 

little strategic gain.

Problems of grand strategy and future military reform are not the concern of brigade and battalion commanders when training forces to deploy 

to either Iraq or Afghanistan, or for any other war. The major limiting 

resource for commanders preparing forces to deploy is time, where time 

forces commanders to establish specific training requirements to develop 

and master certain military capabilities subject to the constraints of the 

ARFORGEN process. Virtually all commanders interviewed, ones that 

trained and prepared forces for OIF, even those forces deploying under 

SFA, established fighting competence as main priority for deployment.68

Complementary capabilities and competencies, including language training, cultural awareness, and the integration of new technologies did not 

assume priority over fighting competence. The emphasis on establishing 

fighting competency for combat formations, rather than inhibit the ability 

of leaders and units to adapt once in theater, actually enabled adaptation. 

Leaders and units that believe they can fight and defeat their armed adversaries in any circumstance develop the confidence and ability to deal with 

the emotion of fear that is born of uncertainty.
111

In the context of COIN in OIF, and perhaps other forms of low-intensity warfare, the necessity of developing fighting competence and training 

for complementary capabilities weighs most heavily on companies and 

platoons. Fighting and lethal engagement at the company and platoon level are far more likely than at higher echelons, and thus company commanders and platoon leaders must be able to effectively maneuver forces 

and integrate fires, and demonstrate that competence in training. The requirement of the brigade and battalion headquarters, rather than maneuvering forces, is to de-conflict airspace, clear ground for direct and indirect 

fires, and provide additional resources. Large scale brigade and battalion 

controlled offensive operations are the exception, not the norm.69

Fighting is the first competency of any military organization in any 

form of warfare, and developing the fighting capability of the subordinate 

combat organization most likely to engage in the fighting through realistic 

training must remain the first priority of commanders. The charge that the 

Army’s conventional war fixation prior to OIF led to its failures in Iraq 

after the invasion may retain merit when discarding the effects of strategic 

error, but it may be more of an indictment of command leadership and 

vision, on officer development and education that failed to develop the 

capacity for operational art in small units, versus simply an overarching 

organizational indictment. Indeed, as long as units attained basic fighting 

competence, the effectiveness of units in OIF was perhaps far more dependent on the quality and ability of command leadership with respect to 

operational art. Thus a broad organizational charge, one that claims the 

only way to fix the Army to prepare for low-intensity conflict is to effect 

radical and permanent changes in tactical organization, training, and doctrine, is misguided.70

Competent, disciplined, and cohesive fighting organizations are the 

offspring of realistic training and serve to temper the effects of the inherent terror and fear that almost every soldier faces in some form in combat.71 While the character of the war in Iraq was different than that of 

WWII or Vietnam, the emotions experienced by individual soldiers were 

certainly similar. The needs of self-preservation are met when soldiers 

have confidence in the ability of their leadership and their unit’s ability to 

fight through any problem. Failing to invest properly in the development 

of fighting skills in combat units risk undermining cohesion and trust, 

where self-preservation instincts can feed off of fear and mere survival 

becomes the main objective. Moreover, it is arguable that forces fundamentally good at fighting, with leaders good at applying and controlling 

force, are actually far less apt to use indiscriminate and excessive violence 
112

than those forces that lack good, basic fighting competence, even when 

violence is less typical and more incidental in combat as perhaps seen in 

OIF.72 In Iraq, soldier fear was arguably less of a threat to unit effectiveness than it was to the random civilian driving anywhere in the vicinity of 

a US convoy poorly led and manned by scared soldiers with overactive 

trigger fingers.73

Additionally, the decentralized nature of combat operations and relative economy of forces in OIF, in some areas far more than others, 

mandated internal self-sufficiency in organizational tactical ability, to 

include casualty treatment and evacuation. Any commander, when faced 

with limited time and resources to prepare unit for combat—including 

low-intensity warfare as often seen in OIF—that sacrifices training time 

devoted to developing fighting competence to the development of complementary capabilities of secondary importance, demonstrates suspect 

judgment. Such a decision not only risks the lives of soldiers, but also 

the mission in general.

The comments and insights of commanders, ones that experienced 

significant success in OIF through highly innovative and unique approaches to fighting and problem solving, suggest that Army tactical doctrine for 

combined arms warfare was a good tool for building the critical baseline 

of tactical competence necessary for units preparing to deploy to Iraq. Adaptation and innovation in combat resulted as a product of the command 

climate and the commander’s ability, on the potential for operational art 

and thinking within the organization. This potential, however, fundamentally relies on units that can fight first.

The richness of experience that ought to inform the historical record 

of OIF, particularly in detailed accounts in primary sources, is perhaps the 

largest gap not only in this essay, but also in other histories written concerning the conduct of military operations in OIF. The cited interviews, 

however, do provide the outline of what commanders ought to be when 

considering leadership traits and how learning organizations think and act 

in the COIN environment as seen in OIF, and perhaps in war in general. 

The scope of this essay denies a scientific approach to a general and simple 

theory of how the US Army learned and adapted in OIF and how operational art and thinking became manifest; that is, beyond the Clausewitz 

claim that theory is study. To that end, detailed military history is essential, 

as its study throughout a career can negate the negative influences of tradition and culture on learning and adapting. We must first, however, revisit 

the history and narratives of OIF as they exist.
113

Notes

1. Robert Gates, interview on 60 Minutes with Katie Couric, 15 May 2011.

2. Frans P.B. Osinga, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of 

John Boyd (New York: Routledge, 2007), 183.

3. Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 101-5, Staff Officers Field 

Manual: The Staff and Combat Orders (Washington, DC: The War Department, 

19 August 1940).

4. Christopher R. Paparone, “US Army Decisionmaking: Past, Present, and 

Future,” Military Review 81, no. 4 (July-August 2001), 50. Paparone argues that 

decision makers may be more comfortable or competent conducting MDMP’s 

procedural aspects. They may give inadequate attention to the less-structured, 

but more important, step of generating stratagems in the first place. Arguably, 

this is the consequence of providing extremely detailed guidance in doctrine 

regarding procedure, perhaps leading to doctrinal fixation.

5. Field Marshal Viscount Slim, Defeat Into Victory: Battling Japan in 

Burma and India, 1942-1945 (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 540-541. 

Slim argues that scarcity and necessity forces innovation.

6. Slim, Defeat Into Victory, 540-541.

7. Marston, Phoenix from the Ashes, 247.

8. Clausewitz, On War, 113, 120. Danger is a component of friction, one that 

makes things that seem easy become hard, and is born from interaction with a 

thinking and lethal enemy. In the case of OIF, certainly personal danger was a factor 

for those conducting security operations on a daily basis. However, there was rarely 

a circumstance where mission danger came into play as a motivator for changing 

the way a unit conducts operations. In other words there was little chance that an 

insurgent group could defeat a large US force, even at the platoon level.

9. Osinga, Science, Strategy and War, 183.

10. The sufficiency of troop levels is highly subjective to the factors a commander considers when viewing the totality of forces available. If the commander 

is considering only available US forces, then he may indeed feel that troop levels 

are insufficient. When factoring only the singular factor of US troop availability, 

arguably the entire war from beginning to end has been an economy of force.

11. BG010, Battalion Commander, Interview by Nathan Springer, Fort 

Stewart, GA, 14 March 2011. The commanders discussed the benefit of a lack 

of funds under the CERP program. The severing of funds actually improved 

relationships with local and tribal leaders in Iraq, where previously commanders 

were seen as nothing but gravy trains. In essence, it had a normalizing effect. 

Craig A. Collier, “Now That We’re Leaving Iraq, What Did We Learn?” Military 

Review 9, no. 5 (September-October 2008). Collier’s argument is that rather than 

help the war effort in Iraq, large-scale expenditures and projects actually funded 

and perpetuated the insurgency.

12. BG010, Interview.

13. BH020, Interview; BG070, Army Field Grade Officer, Interview by 

Nathan Springer and Tom Walton, Fort Stewart, GA, 15 March 2011; BA040, 
114

Interview; BA020, Battalion Commander, Interview by Mark Battjes and 

Ben Boardman, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 23 February 2011; BD040, Company 

Commander, Interview by Dustin Mitchell and Ben Boardman, Fort Knox, KY, 

15 March 2011; BE060, Interview; BB030, Brigade Commander, Interview by 

Mark Battjes and Nathan Springer, Fort Bliss, TX, 3 March 2011; BC020, Interview; BG060, Battalion Commander, Interview by Mark Battjes, Fort Stewart, 

GA, 15 March 2011. A general theme in all interviews is that the military staff at 

the brigade and battalion levels simply could not, in OIF, function as organized 

in accordance with doctrine and tradition. The isolation of the staff from the 

environment, from the context of reporting, prevents the staff from getting ahead 

of the commander, or from devising metrics that lead to predictive planning. 

Instead, the commander directs the staff continuously, and the staff must remain 

attuned to the dialogue the commander has with subordinate commanders. In 

this sense, the subordinate units are de facto tasking the higher staff for resources, and the insights of commanders are informing staff products perhaps more 

than staff products are informing commanders. Some commanders view that 

the staff as organized cannot overcome the inherent limitations that the COIN 

environment imposes, although the CTC rotations can give this impression. 

Commanders have used various methods to overcome this. Staffs adapt and 

must self-synchronize to the COIN reality, around the commanders’ dialogue 

and guidance. Some commanders have completely reorganized their staff around 

the mission, instead of traditional functions, to make the staff more effective in 

the COIN environment.

14. BG060, Interview.

15. BG040, Interview.

16. BF020, Civilian Advisor, Interview by Aaron Kaufman and Rick Johnson, 

Boston, MA, 11 March 2011. From the perspective of an outsider with many years 

of advising a senior US commander, many senior to subordinate relationships involving senior officers are sycophantic, and commanders are not challenged when 

inconsistent guidance is given, or is made in error due to poor understanding.

17. Opinion of the author. The British Army has a culture of the mess, the 

mess being where officers go to eat, drink, socialize, and dialogue. Within this 

culture there is a tradition of taking off the rank, where commanders’ opinions 

and assessments are challenged freely without a risk of retribution. This is 

certainly easier in the British Army regimental system, where officers can spend 

decades in the same unit. This tradition, whether formal or informal, can serve to 

positively influence command climate through a respect of the opinion, intellect, 

and experiences of others.

18. Wright and Reese, On Point II, Transition to the New Campaign, 175.

19. Personal experience of the author. I served as a brigade planner in OIF 

II from March 2004 to February 2005. I participated in staff mission analysis 

conducted by G3 Plans, 1st Infantry Division, in Tikrit in October 2004, and 

was witness to the planning guidance issued by MNC-I. I also was privy to the 

coordination meetings held between 1ID and the Salah ad Din IECI director, Dr 

Zehki. In essence, the IECI director acknowledged all requirements for the elec-
115

tions, and was provided at least 1.5 million USD to pay for all workers, worker 

training, and logistics. IECI proved incapable of meeting the requirements to 

both plan and execute the election, despite the acknowledgements.

20. Personal experience of the author. I served at the 2d Brigade, 1ID action 

officer at the distribution and collection node for the Salah ad Din Province 

in support of Operation Seeds of Liberty, located at the Public Distribution 

Site warehouse just south of Tikrit. This job was a last minute task due to the 

recognition that IECI had failed in its responsibilities. I later participated in the 

MNC-I after action review held at Al Faw Palace on Camp Victory in February 

2005. I was one of two tactical-level (brigade and below) participants, the other 

being a captain from 3d Brigade, 1ID (Diyala Province). The AAR was led by 

the C-9 section (Civil-Military Affairs) of MNC-I, and most of the AAR consisted of praise on the successful outcome of the elections, with some improvements 

recommended for corps level staff and planning. I raised the point that the elections approached failure, due in no small part by the planning constraints placed 

on subordinate divisions. The planning constraints and assumptions did not 

enable effective contingency planning to address the greatest risk to the election, 

which was the inability of IECI to actually conduct the elections. I am unsure if 

this lesson was placed in the executive summary of the elections AAR.

21. BL290, Battery Commander, Interview by Rick Johnson, Larkhill, United Kingdom, 1 April 2011; BE090, Interview; BH030, Interview.

22. BE090, Interview.

23. AA201, Brigade Commander, Interview by Ken Gleiman and Mike 

Dinesman, Fort Drum, NY, 20 August 2010.

24. BE090, Interview; BG010, Interview.

25. BE090, Interview; BG010, Interview.

26. BG010, Interview.

27. BG010, Interview. This commander likened CERP to a drug, and that 

cutting it off was good in a way as it made the relationships more normal. Working 

around this problem was something that neither he nor his unit had prepared for.

28. BF020, Interview; BH030, Interview; AA103, Brigade Commander, 

Interview by Brian McCarthy and Jesse Stewart, Fort Riley, KS, 16 August 

2010. Several examples of this from interviews involve the targeting of High 

Value Individuals, directed from higher echelons to subordinate units. Targeting 

lists at higher echelons may fail to understand the role of the HVI in civil society, clinging instead to a black and white approach to the enemy in the COIN 

environment. The black and white approach to targeting may actually expand the 

insurgency and disrupt efforts to decrease violence and increase stability. Various 

commanders have ignored targeting directives, created restricted target lists 

(RTIs), or left HVI targeting to subordinate commanders with a better understanding of the environment.

29. Martin van Creveld, The Art of War: War and Military Thought (New 

York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005), 37-38.

30. Mark Moyar, A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the 

Civil War to Iraq (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 10.
116

31. Merriam-Webster, s.v. “Empathy,” http://www.merriam-webster.com/

dictionary /empathy (accessed 21 May 2011).

32. Department of the Army, FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, 7-2.

33. Department of the Army, FM 6-22, Army Leadership, 4-9.

34. John Bauer, “The Role of Empathy in Irregular Warfare,” Military Review (July-August 2009), 100.

35. Merriam-Webster, s.v. “Compassion,” http://www.merriam-webster.

com/dictionary /compassion (accessed 21 May 2011). Merriam-Webster 

defines compassion as a sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it; see also Robert Roberts, “Emotions in the 

Christian Tradition,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 

Edition). The claim compassion is good, or virtuous, has perhaps more to do 

with a particular Judeo-Christian tradition and worldview that exalts suffering, 

both actual and vicarious, and pity, more than perhaps a universally consistent 

philosophical perspective; Personal opinion of the author. In the context of the 

field commander, when the emotion of compassion becomes manifest in the 

pity and vicarious suffering of others, preceding a compulsion to ameliorate 

the suffering, the commander is risking the consistency of his intellect to the 

extremes of emotion, and thus perhaps biasing decisions to the immorality 

of unreason and irrational forces. His subordinates are, in turn, exposed to 

the same. Compassion is perhaps at best amoral and highly particular to the 

character of the commander and the ability of the commander to control and 

temper the influences of compassion. Compassion may be an emotional manifestation of empathy, but it is not equivalent to or a requirement of empathy. 

As a company commander operating in East Baghdad in 2007, appealing to 

simple justice and fairness when conducting combat operations was a way to 

develop empathy among leaders and soldiers. Internal perceptions of one’s 

moral worth or virtue fail to consider how we were seen by the Iraqi culture 

that was so foreign to us, e.g. as foreign occupiers, non-Arabs, a disrupter of 

stability, with free reign to do as we pleased with few consequences. Understanding that Iraqis would never view us as we often viewed ourselves forces 

one to question our perceptions of our own virtue and righteousness. Viewing 

ourselves as a force for good, endowed with the compassion to ameliorate the 

suffering of Iraqis, would deny us introspection and a critical eye towards our 

own limitations that our presence and combat operations cause. This emerging empathy proved critical in more effective combat operations that in effect 

brought stability and enabled the defeat of local insurgent groups.

36. Challans, Awakening Warrior, 103, 203. Challans challenges the utility 

of the Golden Rule using a quote from Bertrand Russell, who states “do not 

do unto others as you would have them do unto you; they may have different 

tastes.” Challans also writes that “the Golden Rule turns out to fall short of 

giving guidance on at least three counts: People may have different tastes (there 

are many masochists out there); people should be treated differently based on 

age, position, education, situation (a judge would not rule in the case of a minor 

or incompetent based on how he wants to be treated); and the rule says nothing 
117

about how we should treat ourselves.” Thus, the Golden Rule in implementation can fail to adequately consider the things that distinguish individuals from 

different cultures and traditions that shape belief and thinking.

37. Matthew Moten, The Army Officers’ Professional Ethic: Past, Present, 

and Future (Strategic Studies Institute: February 2010). Moten argues that the 

Army officer corps needs a concise statement of its ethical values to codify the 

diffuse understanding that currently exists. On page 19, Moten contends that “the 

essence of the professional ethic needs no radical change. The ethics of a professional officer serving this constitutional democracy have evolved toward an understanding of the military’s place in and duty to society, a high level of professional 

expertise, a sense of military service as a full-time occupation and a long-term 

calling, a subordination to duly elected and appointed civil authority, an ethos of 

positive and responsible leadership of subordinates, and a moral-ethical compass 

fixed on the laws of war and the Constitution.” In essence, the professional ethic 

of the Army officer corps is internally focused in its duties and responsibilities to 

the society and government it serves; Perez, “The Army Ethic and the Indigenous 

Other,” 1. Perez argues “the military professional, besides being a lethal warrior, 

serves also as a cooperative and creative political actor in the operational environment. It follows that any adequate configuration of the military ethic ought to integrate the soldier’s ethical and political obligations toward the indigenous other.”

38. Challans, Awakening Warrior, 103.

39. Christopher D. Kolenda, “What is Leadership? Some Classical Ideas,” 

in Leadership: The Warrior’s Art, ed. Christopher Kolenda (Carlisle, PA: Army 

War College Foundation Press, 2001), 19.

40. BG060, Interview.

41. Osinga, Science, Strategy and War, 195. Osinga writes on Boyd’s thinking regarding command and control and how it affects initiative. In essence, 

when a commander remains cognitively isolated from the environment, he is de 

facto stifling initiative. The command and control system thus remains too internally focused to enable interaction with the environment and in consequence 

too slow and cumbersome to detect emergences, transitions, and opportunities; 

Arguably, empathy develops only through internal struggle, as it requires a perpetual cognitive battle against one’s own biases and influences, those that have 

shaped and often define us, but that also may serve to inappropriately assign and 

characterize the actions and behavior of others, as well as assess motivation. 

Self-awareness and intellectual humility are perhaps just as difficult to develop, particularly so as a leader advances in age and assumes positions of higher 

command. Rank and authority may blend better with egotism and hubris than 

self-awareness and intellectual humility.

42. Osinga, Science, Strategy and War, 230-231. Osinga writes extensively on the overused and poorly understood OODA (Observation, Orientation, 

Decision, and Action). The most critical aspect is the orientation frame, where 

commanders and units must constantly reorient in contact with the environment 

and enemy to detect changes that emerge over time. Cognitive isolation prevents 

reorientation, and thus preemptively negates the ability to detect change and effi-
118

ciently apply limited military resources create initiative, exploit opportunities, and 

mitigate mission risk.

43. BG010, Interview; BG040, Interview; BE090, Interview; BH020, Interview; BH030, Interview; BC020, Interview; BG100, Interview.

44. Clausewitz, On War, 101.

45. The evolution of TTPs in OIF was steady and constant, stemming from 

unit and enemy abilities to adapt to a thinking opponent. This included radical 

changes in equipment and patrol tactics in response to increasingly lethal IEDs. 

The improvement in offensive capabilities in US forces also benefitted from 

technology, but was perhaps more dependent on the improved ability of our 

leaders, working embedded in the population. Technology in this aspect served 

to complement more effective practices.

46. Personal opinion of the author. This is an inference based on the numerous interviews conducted by the team, informed through discussions of mission 

command in OIF, the unique approaches that many commanders took to achieve 

progress, often with no guidance or directives from higher headquarters. This 

inference speaks highly to the character traits of the commanders interviewed, as 

it is arguable that without the right character traits, commanders would not have 

chosen to methods that they did while serving in OIF, as there was no crisis or 

hierarchical control factor that could compel innovation.

47. Opinion of the author. In developing and maintaining unit cohesion, 

commanders are often obligated to create and sustain the unit’s perception of 

its inherent virtue, to appeal to common emotions, patriotism, unit history and 

mythology. The commander must reconcile the warrior-leader persona, one that 

extols the virtues and moral nature of the unit’s mission and operations in combat, with the larger realities as they actually exist in the environment. It is risky 

to perpetuate mythology that does not conform the experiences of what units, 

leaders, and soldiers experience in the combat environment.

48. Russell, Innovation, Transformation, and War, 64-68, 110-116.

49. BA010, Interview; BA020, Interview.

50. BA020, Interview.

51. BA010, Interview; BA020, Interview; Thomas E. Ricks, “Situation 

Called Dire in West Iraq,” The Washington Post, 11 September 2006. This article 

quotes from several officers that concur with the analysis. Arguably, not a single 

officer quoted in the article has knowledge of what is actually happening on the 

ground, and perhaps no knowledge of the Awakening movement.

52. BA010, Interview.

53. BH020, Interview.

54. BH020, Interview.

55. Personal experience of the author in 2007. Local Iraqi leaders always 

expressed their desire for neighborhood watches in order to give people the perception that they had the ability to secure themselves in an environment that often even lacked basic rule of law. Insurgents, criminals, gangsters, etc., appeared 

to control the environment more that ISF and CF. Commanders were explicitly 

prohibited from creating neighborhood watch programs.
119

56. Bribery in particular is problem seen by many commanders and units in OIF.

57. T. E. Lawrence, “Twenty-Seven Articles,” The Arab Bulletin (20 August 

1917). Lawrence’s fifteenth article states, “Do not try to do too much with your 

own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is 

their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under 

the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, 

perhaps, you think it is.”

58. Personal experience of the author. During one cordon and search 

operation in the Adamiyah district of Baghdad in 2007, I witnessed an ISF unit 

collecting countless antique swords and knives from the home of a widow in a 

Sunni neighborhood under the justification that such item constituted a security 

risk and were thus unlawful, which is both untrue and not legally factual. The 

antique swords and knives belonged to the deceased husband, who until his 

death owned an antique weapons shop. The senior military advisor, a major at 

the time, justified the behavior by appealing to the authority of the Iraqi Army 

commander, saying that it’s their country, they can do what they want. Anecdotally, this arbitrary confiscation of legal property by ISF leaders was a common 

occurrence in Baghdad.

59. Kimberly Kagan, “Operation Seventh Veil: Malign Officials and the 

Rule of Law” (Case Study 1, Best Practices in Counterinsurgency, Institute for 

the Study of War, 1 April 2010), 1.

60. Kagan, “Operation Seventh Veil,” 2.

61. Kagan, “Operation Seventh Veil,” 2.

62. Kagan, “Operation Seventh Veil,” 2.

63. Laura Hartman, Fiona Wilson, and Denis Arnold, “Positive Ethical Deviance Inspired by Moral Imagination: The Entrepreneur as Deviant,” Journal for 

Business, Economics, and Ethics 6, no. 3 (2005), 344; Christopher R. Paparone, 

“Design and the Prospects for Deviant Leadership,” Small Wars Journal (8 September 2010), http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/530-paparone.

pdf (accessed 16 May 2011). Paparone discusses creative deviance as a form of 

adaptive command, which can be seen, improperly, as a form of insubordination.

64. Bruce Hoffman, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq (RAND 

Occasional Paper, June 2004), 9. Hoffman argues in 2004 that US conventional 

forces in Iraq are failing and training may not be sufficient to address the problem. In essence, the Army requires a peacetime approach to reform, in the form 

of doctrinal, organizational, and ethos reform.

65. Jeremy L. Peifer, “Training and Organization for COIN Conflicts: A 

Historic Perspective with Contemporary Applications” (Master’s thesis, Naval 

Postgraduate School, December 2010), 71; John A. Nagl, “Let’s Win the Wars 

We’re In,” Joint Forces Quarterly no. 52 (1st Quarter 2009), 25.

66. John A. Nagl and Paul L. Yingling, “New Rules for New Enemies,” 

Armed Forces Journal International, 144 (October 2006), http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/10/2088425 (accessed 15 April 2011).

67. Marston, Phoenix from the Ashes: The Indian Army and the Burma 

Campaign, 2, 247. The Indian Army in 1939 was an internal security apparatus, 
120

ill prepared to face the Imperial Japanese Army in Burma; Gian Gentile, “A 

Strategy of Tactics: Population-centric COIN and the Army,” Parameters 39 

(Autumn 2009), 14.

68. BG080, Battalion Commander, Interview by Mark Battjes and Tom Walton, 

Fort Stewart, GA, 16 March 2011; BG020, Brigade Commander, Interview by Mark 

Battjes and Tom Walton, 14 March 2011; BA040, Interview; BE060, Interview; 

BC020, Interview; BB020, Battalion Commander, Interview by Mark Battjes and 

Nathan Springer, Fort Bliss, TX, 2 March 2011; BG060, Interview; BG040, Interview; BH020, Interview; BA090, Brigade Commander, Interview by Ben Boardman 

and Mark Battjes, Fort Riley, KY, 24 February 2011; BD010, Interview.

69. Arguably, had a commander chose to sacrifice tactical fighting competence to gain an advantage in complementary capabilities in OIF, he would do so 

at the expense of companies and platoons prior to a mission rehearsal exercise 

at a CTC. A commander could do this through mandating specialized individual and small unit training that disrupts organizational cohesion and leadership, 

especially when units are beginning to reestablish combined arms maneuver 

competence in the form of live-fire activities, situational training exercises, and 

combat systems gunnery at the company and platoon level. The former brigade 

and battalion commanders interviewed clearly understood the risks of failing to 

develop tactical competence at the company and platoon level. None lamented 

the loss of battalion and brigade sized combined arms maneuver competence 

against a near-peer enemy during their unit train-ups for OIF, although some 

stated that the Army must reestablish that capability at some future point. 

Although Army CTCs, during mission rehearsal exercises, did inject scenarios 

in the form of out of sector (OOS) missions that required brigade and battalion level planning, command, and control of multi-company or battalion-sized 

offensive operations.

70. Army platoons and companies, organized for fighting conventionally, 

proved adept at fighting in a variety of conditions from the beginning of OIF. 

As a function of command leadership and a latent potential for operational art, 

many units proved very capable learning, adapting, and innovating in OIF, more 

so as command leadership arguably improved through education and experience 

over multiple deployments.

71. Van Creveld, The Art of War, 122-124. Ardant du Picq’s influential 

Battle Studies is perhaps the most well known of a theme of military scholarship seeking to understand why soldiers fight, when individually most men are 

cowards, and to understand and harness the moral forces the create cohesion 

that enable an Army to fight.

72. Personal experience of the author. In both OIF II and OIF 06-08, on 

several occasions, soldiers in CLPs often lacked tactical acumen in identifying 

threats, and thus used force as a response to uncertainty. Leaders on CLPs, 

most often logistics officers, are not trained to control force and assess threat. 

Training scenarios for logistics patrols center on the convoy live-fire, which 

involves using maximum force against a threat and then driving away. Multiple incidents occurred on MSR Tampa in OIF II, where brigade units even 
121

found cars with dead people still in them after they had been shot by a CLP. 

The brigade commander’s vehicle was shot on MSR Tampa at night, even after 

giving recognition signals.

73. BA020, Interview.

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CHAPTER 6

THE PROFESSION OF ARMS, MILITARY HISTORY, AND 

THE POTENTIAL FOR OPERATIONAL ART AND THINKING

The military history of OIF and its ramifications for the US Army 

will coalesce over the next several decades. A history that centers on big 

narratives and claims, on external factors imposing change on the conduct 

of the war will prove useless to a profession attempting to understanding 

and learn from the past. The rest of what’s left, mainly books on TTPs 

and lessons learned, will teach us nothing beyond aspects of particular 

tactics—field craft—which are all relatively useless as sources of learning when taken out of context. This scenario anticipates a future debate 

concerning the profession of arms and its critical relationship to military 

history, which ultimately centers on two factors. First, military history is 

essential to the development of future officers and commanders. Second, 

the military is also responsible for the shaping of military history. In this 

vein, the military must first seek to preserve contextual experience in the 

form of documents, oral and unit histories and other primary sources, as 

well as enable timely declassification of documents.

The exponential growth of data storage capability, unit and equipment 

turnover, and over classification of electronic products have all conspired 

to undermine the ability of the Army to preserve its own experience beyond what stored in the minds that served in OIF. Massive data storage 

means that organizing thinking and files and removing old or irrelevant 

material is not that important. Electronic folders filled with data are better 

than floors and shelves piled with documents. Policing this digital realm 

is often beyond the means of the so-called knowledge managers, the gate 

keepers of database storage and organizing of information. Classified 

electronic documents and media had to remain in theater, so even if the 

gate keepers could keep information organized, there were still significant 

hurdles to getting it home. In any case, the necessity of declassifying gigabytes of data through formal procedures makes any formal effort to preserve experience even more difficult. Furthermore, the unit rotation model 

ensured that collected experience and its interested human agents were 

soon separated from the unit that captured it. Additionally, the lack of a 

consistent and continual effort to collect the experiences of commanders 

and primary staff officers in the form of oral histories that ask the right 

questions further compound the problem of primary source collection. The 

management aspects of the war as well as the failure to interview officers 
124

in a systematic way during or immediately following deployment appear 

to have dealt history a potentially fatal blow from the beginning.

This paper and the interviews that supplied much of the information 

serve to underscore the organizational failure that continues to emerge 

concerning the collective histories of the war not only in Iraq but also in 

Afghanistan. It also serves, however, to refute some dominant narratives 

highlighted in the introduction concerning the conduct of the US Army 

in Iraq. The rejection narrative, or the narrative that claims the US Army 

rejected COIN in the 1970s, provides no causative basis for making claims 

about the Army’s conduct in OIF, and is refuted by the contexts of the 

period. The doctrine as strategy—and thus the doctrine that won the war 

idea—is also refuted easily by the interviewed cited in this paper. The final narrative, that doctrine is determinant in recent Army history, requires 

more detail to refute, but is refuted in the end.

On the Utility of Doctrine

Assigning value to doctrinal literature is difficult, as determining the 

efficacy of the product is subject to so many influencing contexts that any 

conclusion may prove easily refutable. Nevertheless, the US Army and 

most western armies are certainly wedded to doctrinal literature. However, the utility of doctrine should neither be considered in a holistic sense, 

in a take it or leave it approach, nor as a qualitative factor in a point for 

historical discourse concerning the Army in OIF. Field manuals in the context of current Army tactical organizations, particularly at the company 

and platoon level, have proven their usefulness. Arguably, achieving mastery of tactical doctrine towards the integration of combined arms through 

training is fairly straightforward given the time and resources, even when 

considering the turbulence of ARFORGEN. Furthermore, tactical doctrine 

lends itself to rapid adjustment when the environment and circumstances 

change, as it easy to assess efficacy when it fails to work; it is susceptible to immediate feedback and with the right leadership and baseline of 

training has built-in adaptability. The main body of operational doctrine, 

including FM 3-24, must serve a different purpose than tactical doctrine, 

and is of a different character altogether.1

Thus, to avoid claiming an authority that never truly exists, COIN doctrine—rather than being authoritative and prescriptive—should be considered informative and descriptive. It is a book of ideas, and not a cookbook, 

and thus avoids the polarization of opinion regarding its supposed effects 

on the force. Arguments on doctrinal authority in the case of FM 3-24 and 

OIF become moot, and ultimately distract from about how units became 
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learning organization under leaders with a capacity for operational art. If 

the value of FM 3-24 is dissociated from any clear notion of intellectual 

and moral authority, and instead is grounded in evolving ideas that serve to 

inform rather than direct or control, then perhaps it can better serve in the 

intellectual development of leaders and commanders that continually face 

problems in war that defy any particular approach.

COIN Doctrine and its Place

Approximating the value of FM 3-24 for commanders that led forces 

in combat in Iraq is difficult. Interviews indicated that a clear understanding and knowledge of FM 3-24 varied significantly. Most commanders had 

read the manual, but opinions on its utility and sufficiency varied widely. 

Some commanders clearly saw value in FM 3-24, appealing to certain 

principles and the value of developing a long approach to problem solving 

in the form of campaigning.2 Others saw contradictions in doctrine that 

conflicted with significant operational experience.3 One commander clearly viewed FM 3-24 as only a set of ideas that must be disassociated from 

other doctrine approaches and MDMP.4 Another commander remarked on 

the tendency of doctrine to establish a mindset, one that allows common 

men to appear uncommon.5 One commander credited FM 3-24 in shifting 

paradigms and mindsets, but also remarked that doctrine too often fails to 

reconcile inconsistencies; it is simply rewritten, which can lead to confusion because it is supposed to be a foundational education document.6

 Another former brigade commander remarks that he was told during his operational out brief at the COIN Center For Excellence in Taji, Iraq, not to 

worry about FM 3-24, as his organization was already learning and adapting.7

 Commenting indirectly on his peers, one commander claimed that the 

perception of doctrine as an instruction manual exists, including FM 3-24.8

Concerning operational planning, in the form of campaign development 

and execution, some commanders viewed that traditional staff functions 

and processes defined doctrinally did not serve to aid the commander in 

addressing the operational problems as seen in OIF.9 That this concern was 

manifested at the brigade and battalion levels, where the feedback on the 

efficacy of the campaign is more closely tied to realities of the environment, it is arguable that at higher echelons this problem was even greater.10

Concerning the development of small unit organizational effectiveness and tactical competence prior to deployment, there is perhaps broader 

consensus, particularly when concerning tactics, especially TTPs, but not 

at the expense of developing fighting competence first.11 As far as an educational tool for preparing leaders and soldiers for COIN, one commander 

remarked that FM 3-24 was only one of many books, historical case stud-
126

ies, and theories used in a comprehensive leader development program 

prior to deployment.12

Many of the commanders interviewed provide a much broader, descriptive, and intuitive lens into the military history of OIF that defies an 

historical analysis or narrative that seeks to place FM 3-24, or any other theory, as the source of reform and adaptation that led to operational 

success. At best, FM 3-24 served to inform, at worst, it was ignored or 

disregarded. The true military history of OIF thus defies a doctrine-centric perspective, to the benefit of future commanders and military leaders. 

Learning the history of OIF requires both broad historical context and a 

highly particular understanding of command leadership, thinking, and decisions across multiple deployments. When studied and learned properly, 

the descriptive military history of OIF will serve as a far better tool in 

developing the thinking and decision making of future commanders than 

any doctrinal manual or scientific theory can provide.

Overcoming Tradition and Culture Through Education

In the context of OIF, US Army commanders had to overcome an organizational bias towards the science of war, to the prescriptive versus 

descriptive aspects of military theory, that both heavily influences Western 

military thought and US military tradition and professional military education. This bias has deep roots, and perhaps extends as far back in Western 

medieval warfare, when aristocrats and commanders had broad access to 

Frontinus and Vegetius, and their thoughts on particular tactics, organization, and equipment, but lacked the continuity in thought, worldview, and 

insight into that could serve to provide context to the means and methods 

described by both Roman military theorists.13 The bias towards theory extends from the French Enlightenment, where philosophers believed that as 

humans are part of the physical world, and the physical world is rational 

and subject to the laws of Newtonian physics, so too are humans subject 

rational laws.14 War as a human event is thus an engineering problem, 

subject to rational laws and principles, and science would reveal the secret 

laws of war. Army doctrine, particularly planning doctrine, can give this 

impression, and its emphasis in PME can imprint the idea that war is a 

problem requiring a scientific approach in order to run staffs, and fight brigades and divisions. Thus the weight of instruction in PME must revolve 

around gaining proficiency and efficiency in processes.

War can serve to overcome the shortcomings of PME where experiential learning combined with good learning habits leads to adaptation 

and change.15 Shortcomings in PME, however, can prove detrimental the 
127

conduct of war and impose risk from the outset of conflict. Retired Marine Corps General Paul K. Van Riper attributes failures in US military 

PME that overemphasized the science of war out of context, focusing on 

systems analysis and management, at the expense of military history, art 

and theory, as a factor contributing in the Vietnam debacle.16 Following 

Vietnam, visionary leaders such as Admiral Stansfield Turner reinstated 

the study of history, military art, and theory as the centerpiece of education 

in the curriculum at the Naval War College. Van Riper argues that the PME 

trends in the decade following the First Gulf War returned to the follies of 

the past, where predictions that technology and systems management tools 

could change the nature of war. He states:

The promise of information technology and the rewards that 

it seemingly offers in terms of automated command and control, surveillance and reconnaissance, and precision-guided 

munitions holds a place in the minds of many defense leaders 

similar to the technological advantage allegedly provided by 

systems analysis, nuclear weapons, and computers in the 1950s 

and 1960s. Methodical planning techniques like those currently 

promised by advocates of “effects-based operations” and “operational net assessment” stand in for Robert McNamara’s systems engineering of military decision making. Having been a 

victim–along with an entire generation of American military officers–of such shallow thinking, I find myself habitually warning those who will listen of the potential for repeating the tragic 

mistakes of the 1950s and 1960s.17

There is no substitute for the study of military history, and academic 

historians are an integral part of this effort. Thus, Van Riper also offers 

words of caution regarding moral ascendancy that can arise when a military officer with command experience assumes that the academic historian 

has nothing to offer the seasoned officer.

I learned an important lesson reading Keegan’s book: not to 

downplay the ability of those without active military service or 

actual combat experience to write meaningfully about battle. I 

nearly went no further than the first sentence in The Face of 

Battle, in which Keegan states, “I have not been in a battle; not 

near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath.” I 

again thought of closing the book two pages later when the author revealed he had never served in uniform. Luckily, I chose to 

ignore my prejudices and pressed on. As a result, I learned much 

from this now-famous military historian, not the least being that 
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it is possible to become schooled in the profession through vicarious means, and in some cases, even more so than those who 

spend an unreflective lifetime in military attire.18

The last sentence in Van Riper’s comment appeals to the insufficiency 

of a closed system of professional learning for the military officer, even 

when adding on the additional benefit that experiential learning confers. 

The learning and education of military officers, particularly future commanders, cannot solely consist of institutional professional military education, or on experiential learning alone. The requirements for professional 

knowledge in military affairs place a demand on literacy and familiarity 

with military history, and are not solely met through expertise in doctrine 

and experience.

The Army’s efforts in institutional education face several organizational and cultural problems that lead to officers to devalue PME as an 

important developmental step in one’s career beyond simply checking the 

block towards promotion. Officers are technically evaluated during PME 

in the form of an academic evaluation report, or AER, but the evaluation 

does not serve any function beyond codifying that an officer has met the 

baseline requirements to pass the course; it does not inform on the officer’s 

suitability for command or promotion. Selection boards do not consider 

the AER when assessing an officer’s suitability for promotion or command. Demonstrating academic performance and potential, and ostensibly 

intellectual capability vis-à-vis one’s peers are not considered.19

Culturally, the Army does not reward academically rigorous and difficult intellectual pursuits that graduate education can provide. Officers 

may risk their career future when choosing to spend one or two years at 

graduate school at the expense of time in the operational force.20 Experiential learning born of deployed experience and time in the operational 

force provides the credentials that confer suitability for promotion and 

command. As General David Barno testified in 2009:

One of the pernicious dangers of the current system, particularly in the Army, is that there is increasing potential for the most 

intellectually gifted officers, beginning at the rank of captain, to 

be weaned away from the operational, or command-track, career 

path in order to become specialists who will neither command nor 

in most cases ascend to senior rank. If this trend takes hold, many 

of our future commanders may become among the least broadly 

educated and the least intellectual members of the force—hardly 

a recipe for sustained military success. In some ways, this outlook 
129

harkens back to the rightfully maligned British interwar system 

wherein the regimental officer was seen to be most highly esteemed by his peers—in part, because of his utter lack of outside 

education and experience beyond the regiment.21

Concerning the benefits of the military officer in attending civilian 

graduate school, Barno claims that civilian graduate school is better at improving thinking than Army education.22 He also states that future “strategists (either full-time specialists or future generals) absolutely need civilian graduate education to fully hone their skills and expand their thinking 

to the broadest dimensions of strategy in a non-military, intellectually 

diverse academic environment.”23 Barno’s claims give weight to the argument the Army bureaucracy is failing to incentivize academic achievement, which in turn results in officers unprepared for positions requiring 

strategic thought and insight.

Arguably, fixing education and incentivizing academic achievement 

within PME is not sufficient on its own to address the problem. Van Riper 

notes that the study of military history requires life-long inquisitiveness 

and careful reflection, manifested through careful personal study outside 

of PME and a promotion of reading and learning within the operational 

force. The development of habits of thinking and study are crucial in order 

benefit from education. An iterative approach to learning, where an officer 

studies military history only within the confines of institutional education, 

is not sufficient to creating officer that are prepared to lead at levels beyond the tactical and think strategically.24

In this vein, fixing the curriculum at the Army service schools is only part 

of the answer. Hypothetically, if the strategic thinking of senior leaders is deficient, then the fixing of instruction and curriculum at Army services schools 

would place the emphasis on addressing shortcomings at the Army War College first, and then perhaps at the Command and General Staff College. However, as one former Army officer and service school instructor notes:

The vast majority of people who struggle hard and long enough 

to earn their doctorate have developed habits of mind that enable them to grow intellectually. I find cadets in their undergraduate years to be good learners. And majors in their mid-thirties 

as well. But colonels are typically not good when it comes to 

learning. Their curiosity is replaced with certainties they have 

acquired through their experience. In general reflection challenges us to change, and it is harder to change the older and 

more entrenched we become.25
130

Thus, fixing education, particularly the last official PME experience 

at the end of an officer’s career will neither lead to better strategists and 

flag officer leadership nor address the bureaucratic and cultural problems 

that support anti-intellectualism in the Army. For the military professional, 

particularly those that will attain high rank and authority, the study of military history over a lifetime, combined with advanced education in civilian 

colleges and universities, can force a mental reckoning. This reckoning 

is necessary in the process that ultimately helps develop the critical traits 

necessary for operational art and thinking in the complex operating environments that war offers. Stated simply, it may prove impossible to develop the potential for operational thinking and art in a military educational 

environment that emphasizes a detached, insular, and heavily scientific 

approach to warfare and military thought where one’s ideas are only ever 

exposed to those with he or she associates with the most.

Education as the Means to Fix Military Culture

As General Paul K. Van Riper noted, vicarious learning is often superior to experiential learning in improving the thinking and decision making of military professionals when done in the right environment. Experiential learning can serve to enhance intellectual development, but it can 

also serve to fix opinions and generate false consensus and groupthink 

when confined to the narrowness of a military-centric environment. Outside of evaluating officers for academic performance, perhaps the only 

way to force a cultural change in the Army towards seeing the value in 

the advanced study in military history is to subject their experiences and 

contextual thinking to broad critique from points of view that exist both 

inside and outside of military organizations and the classrooms of PME. 

Arguably, military professionals and commanders become better thinkers 

when they are forced to account for ideas and beliefs in front of peers and 

outsiders in an academically rigorous environment. The resulting intellectual humility and good learning habits thus serve to shape leadership style 

and persona, and perhaps destroy any trappings of hubris born of narrow 

operational experience and entrenched provincial thinking.

The Army, however, cannot afford to send all officers to civilian graduate programs for advanced education. Nor can the Army simply mandate 

that all officers gain job experience in broadening assignments. Officers 

that can expect to command tactical and operational forces in battle, that 

are specifically responsible for maneuvering forces, executing campaigns, 

and engaging the enemy in a variety of operational environments ought to 

be considered separately for advanced education in the humanities, emphasizing military history, social science, and philosophy. Based on recent 
131

operational experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the context of the Army, 

this includes primarily the branches of infantry, armor, special forces, and 

artillery; and to a lesser extent engineer, aviation, military intelligence, 

and civil affairs. The technical, functional, and systems expertise of particular branches and career fields mandates another career and education 

path. While this idea may smack of elitism, there are clearly different command responsibilities between those officers in command of tactical and 

operational forces oriented on fighting and those that command support 

forces or lead specific, non-maneuver staff functions.

While educational opportunities and requirements for officers may 

differ depending on ability and branch, this does not portend a radical 

shift in the way the Army organizes and trains for war. Organizational 

learning and adaptability, rather than being an outcome of top-down, often 

peacetime source of reform such as doctrine, is more often the function 

of command leadership.26 Good leadership breeds adaptability, learning, 

and innovation. However, the means to gain better leadership in the long 

run, to achieve the goals the mission command, will require that the Army 

places the rigorous study of military history in the center of officer education and also fixes the way in which it treats its own history, both in 

collection and in composition. Strengthening the role of military history in 

the development of future commanders will lead to the expansion of the 

potential in operational art and thinking.

Conclusion: The Imperative of Operational Art and Thinking

The war in Iraq demonstrated the necessity for operational art and 

thinking in Army brigades, battalions, and companies, or in essence units 

that operated on a daily basis not on particular, concrete tasks, but units 

that operated under mostly abstract, long-term tasks as communicated 

through intent and mission orders. The improvements in the security environment from 2003 through 2009 were often products of innovation, 

learning, and adapting stemming from a latent potential for operational art 

that existed in unit commanders. Viewing changes in the security environment as a product of doctrine, namely FM 3-24, is both wrong and overly 

determines its effects and consequences.

This approach to understanding the effects of operational art in OIF 

ultimately centers the debate in the cognitive realm, or how commanders 

reflected and thought about fighting in Iraq, and not simply on iterative, 

tactical actions taken to combat the insurgency. Tactical actions were critically important, but more so as an aid to cognitive interaction with the 

environment, towards decreasing the limitations of abstract experience, 
132

of fighting from the TOC. In that sense, tactical actions to position forces, 

such as the distribution of companies and battalions to outposts serve to 

aid direct experience, to enable continuous physical and mental interaction 

with the environment and the enemy. In essence, the relative positioning of 

forces in combat to gain advantage, commonly understood as maneuver in 

warfare, was a prerequisite to the ability of units and commanders to sense 

emergences, transitions, and take opportunities and calculated risks. In this 

case, the distributed positioning of forces—rather than securing the population—enabled cognitive maneuver, as it increased interaction with the 

environment, enabling units to conduct more effective security operations.

Additionally, positioning of forces enabled commanders that retained 

a potential for operational art the ability to reorient the focus of military 

operations at a more rapid pace, which in turn generated opportunities. As 

the local narrative of the problems evolved, shaped by the dialogue between tactical commanders and various other parties, commanders rapidly 

learned and adapted to the conditions, often taking radical and innovative 

actions to affect positive change. In sum, physical positioning enabled interaction, which is critical to enabling cognitive maneuver that relies on 

sensing and contextual sense-making of emergences, which in turn enabled the expression of the latent potential for operational art and thinking 

that existed in good commanders and units.

In the end, the understanding OIF through the lens of operational art 

is perhaps the only way for the Army and future officers to truly benefit 

consequentially from the experience in a way that shapes the professional 

development of future leaders and commanders. Future operating environments for Army forces will also arguably rely on small units operating 

under mission orders, necessitating operational art, unless the Army no 

longer expects to fight in expeditionary wars with a small professional 

Army. Detailed personal accounts, oral histories, and debriefs from OIF 

could provide the basis for a deep and descriptive approach to military history that could serve as a basis for study and reflection, building the next 

generation of operational artists, thinkers, and commanders.
133

Notes

1. Whereas tactical field manuals along with the right leadership leads to 

adaptability in combat, operational manuals can prove intellectually rigid when 

those that use the doctrine have no way of evaluating its efficacy through both 

education and experience. Stated simply, failing to see the different nature and 

purpose of tactical and operational doctrine may lead an officer to conclude 

that operational manuals, such as seen in FM 3-24, is as authoritative as tactical 

doctrine. However, tactical doctrine enables adaptability in action. There is no 

correlation with operational doctrine. Adaptability in thinking is the product of 

education and experience. Operational doctrine as seen in the past, such as the 

various iterations of FM 100-5, must be evaluated on their own, factoring in the 

operational concepts and contexts of the time when attempting to articulate their 

efficacy and usefulness. Concerning empirical methods of analysis, operational doctrine is extremely difficult to formally evaluate. Feedback mechanisms 

attempting to inform determinations of doctrinal efficacy are fundamentally 

indirect, abstract, and often untimely. This assessment of doctrine efficacy must 

also navigate the concealed institutional and organizational bias of leadership 

that have an interest in promoting their ideas either in doctrine or concerning 

doctrine. Perhaps objectively evaluating operational doctrinal efficacy is truly 

impossible, particularly when institutional consensus instead of enemy actions 

will often serve to assess the efficacy and quality of doctrine. Instead of fixating 

on the debate on the efficacy of FM 3-24, on its deficiencies and impact, officers 

should simply acknowledge that it will change as new thinking coalesces, and 

that it may ultimately prove impossible to evaluate its efficacy and unnecessary 

to assess its deterministic effects.

2. BG100, Interview; BA040, Interview.

3. BG010, Interview; BG040, Interview.

4. BC020, Interview.

5. BG040, Interview.

6. BG060, Interview.

7. BA010, Interview.

8. BA020, Interview; Highlighting several inconsistencies that challenge 

FM 3-24 as authoritative operational doctrine serves to inform on the cognitive 

difficulties facing commanders in OIF. Regarding the definition of insurgency 

and the role of intervention forces, one US commander emphasized doctrinal 

inconsistencies manifested in the experiences of US forces fighting in Iraq. 

Problems facing commanders in Iraq often did not mesh with the doctrinal 

approaches as defined in FM 3-24, where US forces, instead of always trying 

to support the legitimate government of Iraq and ISF, were actually fighting 

elements of the government and ISF and supporting former adversaries. See 

BH020, Interview; BB030, Interview; Unity of effort, a traditional principle 

of war and an imperative in FM 3-24, may have never been achieved, and was 

reflected by the comments of a US Army advisor to the Iraqi Ground Forces 

Command. Terms like partnership and reconciliation, promoted at all levels in 
134

2007, were used to guide the efforts of tactical forces, but it is unclear whether 

or not this was achieved at echelons above the division level. The decentralized 

execution of the campaign combined with the perception of many commanders, 

in general, of feeling unconstrained as to the approaches they took, challenges 

notions of control that unity of effort assumes. BC010, Interview. US units and 

Iraqi senior leadership did not have a unified vision of the threat environment 

or the enemy, nor were the Iraqis concerned with COIN. Partnership was never 

truly achieved between IGFC and MNC-I.

9. BC020, Interview; BB030, Interview.

10. Adjusting and adapting to the realities of the environment was mostly a 

deliberate choice of the commander at the brigade level and below, and doctrine 

was never cited as the motivating sources of this choice. See BE080, Battalion 

Commander, Interview by Aaron Kaufman and Rob Green, Fort Irwin, CA, 7 

March 2011; see also BD010, Interview. This commander attributed his adaptability in combat not to doctrine, but to a generational gap in thinking born of 

an inability to effectively box in the enemy into doctrinal templates that began 

in the 1990s, where snippets of ostensibly objective empirical evidence serve 

to broadly categorize the enemy capabilities and intentions; see also BH030, 

Interview. This commander remarked that proficiency in COIN is a function of 

commanders assessing unit and leader capabilities and giving them missions 

within their capabilities.

11. BE060, Interview.

12. BE090, Interview.

13. Van Creveld, The Art of War, 45-58.

14. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, 

and American Enlightenments (New York: Random House, 2004), 151-152. In 

the view of the philosophers of the French Enlightenment, include Diderot, Voltaire, and others, viewed that a broad collection of knowledge of human relations 

and affairs would reveal, through the use of reason and a scientific approach, the 

rational laws that govern society. Thus, rational and just government is simply a 

problem of finding the right scientific theory to engineer the best social outcome 

to the benefit of all peoples; Azar Gat, A History of Military Thought: From the 

Enlightenment to the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 2. Gat 

argues that many scholars have failed to understand the cultural roots of military 

theory bound upon the French Enlightenment, with its emphasis on using the 

natural science as a model to be applied to a Theory of War. De Jomini and his 

book The Art of War is a product of this thinking. Clausewitz as the offspring 

of the German Enlightenment, or rejectionist movement, argued that studying 

human society, interaction, and war in this way is wrong, thus there can be no 

theory. Clausewitz is arguably much harder to understand that de Jomini, but 

because of this is inherently more valuable.

15. Riper, “The Relevance of History to the Military Profession: An American Marine’s View,” 36.

16. Riper, “The Relevance of History to the Military Profession,” 41.

17. Riper, “The Relevance of History to the Military Profession,” 53-54.
135

18. Riper, “The Relevance of History to the Military Profession,” 42.

19. United States Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on the 

Armed Services, Charting the Course for Professional Military Education: 

Hearing before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, 111th Cong., 1st 

sess., 10 September 2009, 88.

20. Charting the Course for Professional Military Education, 23

21. Charting the Course for Professional Military Education, 23

22. Charting the Course for Professional Military Education, 6. Barno is 

specifically referring to resident graduate programs at quality institutions.

23. Charting the Course for Professional Military Education, 88.

24. Charting the Course for Professional Military Education, 89. See 

Murray’s testimony; see also, Sinnreich, “Awkward Partners: Military History 

and American Military Education,” 55-77. Sinnreich devotes significant effort 

to describing how military history must form a central part of officer education, 

and must start well before an officer receives a commission.

25. Challans, Awakening Warrior, 180-181.

26. Russell, Innovation, Transformation, and War, 205. Russell does not 

talk about organizational adaptability and learning as a product of command 

leadership and climate. He defines innovation as the development of new organizational capacities on the field of battle that did not exist when the unit arrived. 

In essence, he argues that innovation is the product of a dialectical process 

influenced through experience.

137

Acronyms

AAB............................................................. Advise and Assist Brigade

AAR...................................................................... After Action Review

ADP............................................................Army Doctrinal Publication

ADRP........................................Army Doctrinal Reference Publication

ARFORGEN.................................................... Army Force Generation

ARTEP ....................................Army Training and Evaluation Program

BATT......................................................... British Army Training Team

BCT.....................................................................Brigade Combat Team

BUA............................................................Battlefield Update Analysis

CAC ................................................. US Army Combined Arms Center

CALL...............................................Center for Army Lessons Learned

CAT........................................................................... Civil Action Team

CENTCOM.........................................................US Central Command

CERP................................... Commander’s Emergency Relief Program

CFLCC.........................Combined Forces Land Component Command

CGSC.......................... US Army Command and General Staff College

CJTF............................................................Combined Joint Task Force

CLP ..................................................................Combat Logistics Patrol

CMH ...........................................US Army Center for Military History
138

CMTC.........................................Combined Maneuver Training Center

COIN........................................................................ Counterinsurgency

CORDS .....Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support

CPA ......................................................Coalition Provisional Authority

CSI ..................................................................Combat Studies Institute

DEWC.................................................. District Executive War Council

EBAO........................................ Effects-Based Approach to Operations

EBO................................................................Effects-Based Operations

FM..................................................................................... Field Manual

HES..............................................................Hamlet Evaluation System

HRC .........................................US Army Human Resources Command

HVI ..................................................................... High Value Individual

IECI.........................................Independent Electoral Commission Iraq

IED..........................................................Improvised Explosive Device

IGFC .....................................................Iraqi Ground Forces Command

IIG................................................................. Interim Iraqi Government

IO ......................................................................Information Operations

ISF.........................................................................Iraqi Security Forces

JCPM...................................................Joint Campaign Planning Model

JRTC ................................................... Joint Readiness Training Center
139

MDMP .............................................Military Decision Making Process

MNC-I.............................................................Multinational Corps Iraq

MNF-I ............................................................. Multinational Force Iraq

MNSTC-I........................ Multinational Security Transition Corps Iraq

MOE..............................................................Measures of Effectiveness

MOP...............................................................Measures of Performance

MSR........................................................................ Main Supply Route

NATO..............................................North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NCO........................................................... Non-Commissioned Officer

NITAT ...........................Northern Ireland Training and Advisory Team

NTC.................................................................National Training Center

OEF..........................................................Operation Enduring Freedom

OIF ..................................................................Operation Iraqi Freedom

OIL..................................Observations, Insights, and Lessons Learned

OODA......................... Observation, Orientation, Decision, and Action

OOS...................................................................Out of Sector (mission)

OPFOR........................................................................ Opposing Forces

PC-COIN...................................Population-Centric Counterinsurgency

PME .....................................................Professional Military Education

PMESII-PT .............. Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure, 

Information, Physical Environment, and Time
140

PSYOP...........................................................Psychological Operations

QRF......................................................................Quick Reaction Force

RIP ..................................................................................Relief in Place

RRF.............................................Responsible Redeployment of Forces

SWEC ................................................. State Executive War Committee

TOC..............................................................Tactical Operations Center

TRADOC.......................... US Army Training and Doctrine Command

TTP................................................Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures

UN.................................................................................. United Nations

USF-I..............................................................United States Forces Iraq

VBIED ............................Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Device

VCI.............................................Vietnamese Communist Infrastructure
141

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Interviews

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2011. This study included interviews of counterinsurgency practitioners 

and policy professionals from the United States and United Kingdom. 

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Boston, Massachusetts

BF010, Former Army Officer. Interview by Richard Johnson and Aaron Kaufman, 11 March 2011.

BF020, Civilian Advisor to MNF-I. Interview by Richard Johnson and 

Aaron Kaufman, 11 March 2011.

BF030, Battery Commander. Interview by Richard Johnson and Aaron Kaufman, 12 March 2011.

BF040, Battery Commander. Interview by Richard Johnson and Aaron Kaufman, 14 March 2011.

Fort Bliss, Texas

BB010, Battalion Commander. Interview by Mark Battjes and Nathan 

Springer, 2 March 2011.

BB020, Battalion Commander. Interview by Mark Battjes and Nathan 

Springer, 2 March 2011.

BB030, Brigade Commander. Interview by Mark Battjes and Nathan 

Springer, 3 March 2011.

Fort Bragg, North Carolina

BC010, Field Grade Officer. Interview by Robert Green and Aaron 

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BC020, Brigade Commander. Interview by Robert Green and Aaron 

Kaufman, 2 March 2011.

BC030, Battalion Commander. Interview by Benjamin Boardman and 

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142

BC040, Battalion Commander. Interview by Benjamin Boardman and 

Richard Johnson, 2 March 2011.

BC050, Battalion Commander. Interview by Benjamin Boardman and 

Richard Johnson, 2 March 2011.

BC060, Battalion Commander. Interview by Benjamin Boardman and 

Richard Johnson, 3 March 2011.

Fort Irwin, California

BE010, Transition Team Leader. Interview by Mark Battjes and 

Thomas Walton, 7 March 2011.

BE020, Transition Team Member. Interview by Mark Battjes and 

Thomas Walton, 7 March 2011.

BE030, Company Commander. Interview by Mark Battjes and Thomas Walton, 8 March 2011.

BE040, Transition Team Leader. Interview by Mark Battjes and 

Thomas Walton, 9 March 2011.

BE050, Battery Commander. Interview by Robert Green and Aaron 

Kaufman, 8 March 2011.

BE060, Brigade Commander. Interview by Mark Battjes and Thomas 

Walton, 9 March 2011.

BE070, Field Grade Officer. Interview by Robert Green and Aaron 

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Kaufman, 7 March 2011.

BE090, Battalion Commander. Interview by Robert Green and Aaron 

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Fort Knox, Kentucky

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BD020, Commander. Interview by Benjamin Boardman and Dustin 

Mitchell, 14 March 2011.

BD030, Commander. Interview by Benjamin Boardman and Dustin 

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BD040, Commander. Interview by Benjamin Boardman and Dustin 

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BD050, Commander. Interview by Benjamin Boardman and Dustin 

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BD060, Field Grade Officer. Interview by Benjamin Boardman and 

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BD070, Field Grade Officer. Interview by Benjamin Boardman and 

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Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

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Thomas Walton, 22 February 2011.

BA020, Battalion Commander. Interview by Mark Battjes and Benjamin Boardman, 23 February 2011.

BA030, Vietnam Veteran. Interview by Aaron Kaufman and Dustin 

Mitchell, 24 February 2011.

BA040, Brigade Commander. Interview by Aaron Kaufman and 

Dustin Mitchell, 23 February 2011.

BA050, Battalion Commander. Interview by Robert Green and Nathan Springer, 23 February 2011.

BA060, Battalion Commander. Interview by Robert Green and Nathan Springer, 23 February 2011.

BA070, Battery Commander. Interview by Richard Johnson and 

Thomas Walton, 24 February 2011.

BA080, Counterinsurgency Advisor. Interview by Richard Johnson 

and Nathan Springer, 9 March 2011.

BA090, Brigade Commander. Interview by Mark Battjes and Benjamin Boardman, 24 February 2011.

Fort Stewart, Georgia

BG010, Battalion Commander. Interview by Nathan Springer, 14 

March 2011.

BG020, Brigade Commander. Interview by Mark Battjes and Thomas 

Walton, 14 March 2011.

BG030, Troop Commander. Interview by Mark Battjes, Nathan 

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144

BG040, Brigade Commander. Interview by Nathan Springer and 

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BG050, Battalion Commander. Interview by Mark Battjes, 15 March 2011.

BG060, Battalion Commander. Interview by Mark Battjes, 15 March 2011.

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BG080, Battalion Commander. Interview by Mark Battjes and Thomas Walton, 16 March 2011.

BG090, Battalion Commander. Interview by Mark Battjes and Nathan 

Springer, 16 March 2011.

BG100, Brigade Commander. Interview by Mark Battjes and Nathan 

Springer, 16 March 2011.

United Kingdom

BI010, Senior British Officer. Interview by Mark Battjes, Benjamin 

Boardman, Robert Green, Richard Johnson, Aaron Kaufman, Dustin 

Mitchell, and Nathan Springer, 29 March 2011.

BI020, Battle Group Commander. Interview by Aaron Kaufman and 

Thomas Walton, 31 March 2011.

BI030, Field Grade Officer. Interview by Robert Green and Thomas 

Walton, 29 March 2011.

BI040, Field Grade Officer. Interview by Mark Battjes and Dustin 

Mitchell, 1 April 2011.

BI050, Dhofar Veterans Panel. Interview by Mark Battjes, Benjamin Boardman, Robert Green, Richard Johnson, Aaron Kaufman, Dustin 

Mitchell, Nathan Springer, and Thomas Walton, 28 March 2011.

BI060, Dhofar Veterans Panel. Interview by Interview by Mark Battjes, 

Benjamin Boardman, Robert Green, Richard Johnson, Aaron Kaufman, 

Dustin Mitchell, Nathan Springer, and Thomas Walton, 2 April 2011.

BI070, Retired General Officer. Interview by Interview by Mark 

Battjes, Benjamin Boardman, Robert Green, Richard Johnson, Aaron 

Kaufman, Dustin Mitchell, Nathan Springer, and Thomas Walton, 30 

March 2011.

BI080, Retired General Officer. Interview by Benjamin Boardman, 

Robert Green, Nathan Springer, and Thomas Walton, 3 April 2011.
145

BI090, Retired General Officer. Interview by Benjamin Boardman, 

Robert Green, Nathan Springer, and Thomas Walton, 4 April 2011.

BI100, Senior Army Officer. Interview by Mark Battjes, Richard 

Johnson, Aaron Kaufman, and Dustin Mitchell, 4 April 2011.

BI110, Battalion Commander. Interview by Mark Battjes, Richard 

Johnson, and Dustin Mitchell, 8 April 2011.

BI120, Retired Army Officer. Interview by Benjamin Boardman, Robert Green, Nathan Springer, and Thomas Walton, 8 April 2011.

BI130, Platoon Commander. Interview by Benjamin Boardman and 

Richard Johnson, 5 April 2011.

BI140, Afghan Army Advisor. Interview by Benjamin Boardman and 

Richard Johnson, 5 April 2011.

BI150, Company Sergeant Major. Interview by Aaron Kaufman and 

Dustin Mitchell, 5 April 2011.

BI160, Company 2d in Command. Interview by Aaron Kaufman and 

Dustin Mitchell, 5 April 2011.

BI170, Afghan Army Advisor. Interview by Aaron Kaufman and 

Dustin Mitchell, 5 April 2011.

BI190, Senior Non-Commissioned Officer. Interview by Mark Battjes 

and Thomas Walton, 5 April 2011.

BI200, Platoon Commander. Interview by Aaron Kaufman and Dustin 

Mitchell, 7 April 2011.

BI210, Company 2d In Command. Interview by Mark Battjes and 

Thomas Walton, 7 April 2011.

BI220, Field Grade Officer. Interview by Aaron Kaufman and Dustin 

Mitchell, 7 April 2011.

BI230, Company Commander. Interview by Robert Green and Nathan 

Springer, 7 April 2011.

BI240, Company Grade Officer. Interview by Benjamin Boardman 

and Richard Johnson, 7 April 2011.

BI250, Battalion Commander. Interview by Benjamin Boardman and 

Richard Johnson, 7 April 2011.

BI260, Non-Commissioned Officer. Interview by Robert Green and 

Nathan Springer, 7 April 2011.
146

BI270, Company Grade Officer. Interview by Mark Battjes and Thomas Walton, 7 April 2011.

BI280, Commander’s Panel. Interview by Richard Johnson, 1 April 2011.

BI290, Battery Commander. Interview by Richard Johnson, 1 April 2011.

BI300, Company Commander. Interview by Richard Johnson, 2 April 2011.

BI310, Company Commander. Interview by Benjamin Boardman and 

Nathan Springer, 31 March 2011.

BI320, Field Grade Officer. Interview by Benjamin Boardman and 

Dustin Mitchell, 29 March 2011.

BI330, Dhofar Veteran. Interview by Robert Green, 28 March 2011.

Washington, DC

BH010, Senior Policy Official. Interview by Mark Battjes, Benjamin Boardman, Robert Green, Richard Johnson, Aaron Kaufman, Dustin 

Mitchell, Nathan Springer, and Thomas Walton, 21 March 2011.

BH020, Brigade Commander. Interview by Mark Battjes, Benjamin 

Boardman, Robert Green, Richard Johnson, Aaron Kaufman, Dustin 

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BH030, Iraq Veterans Panel. Interview by Mark Battjes, Robert Green, 

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BH040, Afghanistan Veterans Panel. Interview by Richard Johnson, 

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BH050, Historian. Interview by Mark Battjes, Robert Green, Richard 

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BH060, Vietnam Political and Military Analyst. Interview by Mark 

Battjes, Benjamin Boardman, Robert Green, and Dustin Mitchell, 24 

March 2011.

BH070, Iraqi Mayor. Interview by Mark Battjes and Robert Green, 25 

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AA201, Brigade Commander. Interview by Ken Gleiman and Mike 

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A CGSC Press Book

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AoWThe United States Army, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the Potential for Operational Art and Thinking Learning from Our Military History