Reading Fred Kaplan’s thoughtful essay, “The End of the Age of Petraeus,” resuscitated long-standing doubts that I had nurtured about the effectiveness of the COIN doctrine.[1] I am one of those professors Kaplan refers to in his essay, except that I was at the Joint Forces Staff College of the National Defense University, serving as Professor of National Security and Strategy, at a time when the COIN was referred to as “military operations other than war” (MOOTW). In that capacity, I belonged to the category of “ether heads”–as our students (senior military officers) called us–who believed in questioning, not just the thinking of America’s military leadership, but also their tactics. When the COIN was being implemented, I was at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies (APCSS). My professional responsibilities included participating in a globally-oriented course entitled, Comprehensive Security Responses to Terrorism (CSRT). As the chief author of that course, I made sure that the topic of counterinsurgency was covered from the American strategic perspective. As contentious as that perspective was, it was driving the American war in Iraq, and promised to do the same in Afghanistan. However, unfortunately, I could get only one person from West Point–an active duty colonel who served in Iraq and was also one of the faculty members at that esteemed institution–to attend the course. He was a strong critic of the COIN operations and, I am sure, was envisioned by the “COINdistas”–as Kaplan refers to them in his essay–as a member of the “red team.” The distance between Hawaii and the mainland remained one of the chief impediments of having a panel of military types visit us to debate the pros and cons of that highly intricate issue.
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