First, for the sake of truth in advertising, I am a moderate in the COIN vs. conventional debate with slight leaning towards the conventional side, although I have done significant study of COIN to include attending the aforementioned COIN seminar in 2007. I am an infantry major in my 12th year of commissioned service and have been to Iraq twice, 2003 and 2005, both times with the 3rd Infantry Division.

I have seen tremendous growth in our efforts to capture lessons learned in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and I applaud those decisions. I think that the leadership of the Army is rightly committed to becoming a learning organization as defined by LTC (R) John Nagl in his book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malay and Vietnam. However, I fear that in doing so, we have lost many of our conventional capabilities that ensure we have no peer competitor today.

The white paper “The Kind and I” spells out several critical issues identified in our field artillery’s ability to provide responsive and accurate lethal fires for the commander in the field. Artillery units are conducting non-standard missions from being reorganized as ad hoc infantry units owning a sector to providing convoy security along the main supply routes in Iraq. Very few artillery units are actually providing fire support in theater. The ability to place lethal fires on target at the desired time to achieve the desired effect in support of a maneuver unit is a critical skill that we can not afford to lose if we are to maintain our role as the dominant land power in the world.

Most telling is that the authors of the white paper are not artillerymen bemoaning the non-doctrinal use of their units. The three authors are former maneuver brigade commanders representing the light, Stryker, and heavy brigade combat team experience from three different divisions in our Army. One of them, COL MacFarland, is one of our great COIN thinkers who, if not directly responsible, had a significant part in the Anbar Awakening that has transformed the very nature of Operation Iraqi Freedom. (See Anbar Awakens: The Tipping Point, by MAJ Niel Smith and COL MacFarland, Military Review, March-April 2008)

I am a former small group leader (SGL) at the Engineer Captain Career Course (ECCC) before coming to Fort Leavenworth this summer and have seen the same phenomenon in our combat engineers. The captain career courses in the Army are the final time in an officer’s professional military education where he will learn branch specific tactics. From then on he will learn combined arms and joint operations at the operational and strategic level as he proceeds in his career. A mastery of basic branch skills is assumed in our officers despite a growing unwillingness by many of our junior officers to open a field manual, even FM 3-24, and study their profession without a direct assignment requiring it. Senior leaders, maneuver and engineer alike, will look at the young officer and expect him to understand the combined arms breach, and other operations, simply because he is an engineer.

We asked each class on day one during our pre-tactics exam how many students had ever participated in a combined arms breach, in training or combat, to get a feel for the experience level of our students coming into the course and how to tailor our instruction to the students. Over the two year period that I was an SGL, I observed the number responding positively drop from about half to only a couple in my last class of 64 captains. I also watched student performance in the tactics portion of the course degrade significantly even as we refined our instructional techniques and made the instruction more basic.

The most disheartening part of the situation was that several leaders contacted the school concerned because we were teaching conventional tactics at all. An engineer brigade commander said he didn’t care about teaching them high intensity conflict and only cared that they were prepared fro the current fight. I find this mindset to be quite short sighted and equally wrong as the senior leaders who wished COIN away as we left Vietnam. This approach would find us with battalion commanders who had never even considered a combined arms breach or deliberate attack, let alone conducted one, in ten years as these officers progress through their career.

The ECCC has taken great strides to teach COIN doctrine by building an entire planning module into the course that is focused on stability operations and counterinsurgency. This module fits into a tactical scenario that begins with deployment to and defense of a friendly country with a transition to the offense followed by stability operations in the formerly enemy country. It is a very important module that includes lethal and non-lethal operations at the battalion and company level that will help the students who will serve as company commanders shortly after graduation and deploy into combat.

The Army has come a long way by publishing the new FM 3-0 Operations, FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency, and FM 3-07 Stability Operations. It is absolutely the right decision for us to bring it on par with the offense and defense. However, we can not elevate COIN above the offense and defense in our education system because the operating force has already done so as units train for deployments. To do so would risk our Army experiencing even further degradation of our ability to conduct combined arms operations. Those skills were learned over years of education in the class room and the dusty fields of our bases and training centers. They do not come easily and they are very perishable if not practiced and reinforced.

First, for the sake of truth in advertising, I am a moderate in the COIN vs. conventional debate with slight leaning towards the conventional side, although I have done significant study of COIN to include attending the aforementioned COIN seminar in 2007. I am an infantry major in my 12th year of commissioned service and have been to Iraq twice, 2003 and 2005, both times with the 3rd Infantry Division.

I have seen tremendous growth in our efforts to capture lessons learned in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and I applaud those decisions. I think that the leadership of the Army is rightly committed to becoming a learning organization as defined by LTC (R) John Nagl in his book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malay and Vietnam. However, I fear that in doing so, we have lost many of our conventional capabilities that ensure we have no peer competitor today.

The white paper “The Kind and I” spells out several critical issues identified in our field artillery’s ability to provide responsive and accurate lethal fires for the commander in the field. Artillery units are conducting non-standard missions from being reorganized as ad hoc infantry units owning a sector to providing convoy security along the main supply routes in Iraq. Very few artillery units are actually providing fire support in theater. The ability to place lethal fires on target at the desired time to achieve the desired effect in support of a maneuver unit is a critical skill that we can not afford to lose if we are to maintain our role as the dominant land power in the world.

Most telling is that the authors of the white paper are not artillerymen bemoaning the non-doctrinal use of their units. The three authors are former maneuver brigade commanders representing the light, Stryker, and heavy brigade combat team experience from three different divisions in our Army. One of them, COL MacFarland, is one of our great COIN thinkers who, if not directly responsible, had a significant part in the Anbar Awakening that has transformed the very nature of Operation Iraqi Freedom. (See Anbar Awakens: The Tipping Point, by MAJ Niel Smith and COL MacFarland, Military Review, March-April 2008)

I am a former small group leader (SGL) at the Engineer Captain Career Course (ECCC) before coming to Fort Leavenworth this summer and have seen the same phenomenon in our combat engineers. The captain career courses in the Army are the final time in an officer’s professional military education where he will learn branch specific tactics. From then on he will learn combined arms and joint operations at the operational and strategic level as he proceeds in his career. A mastery of basic branch skills is assumed in our officers despite a growing unwillingness by many of our junior officers to open a field manual, even FM 3-24, and study their profession without a direct assignment requiring it. Senior leaders, maneuver and engineer alike, will look at the young officer and expect him to understand the combined arms breach, and other operations, simply because he is an engineer.

We asked each class on day one during our pre-tactics exam how many students had ever participated in a combined arms breach, in training or combat, to get a feel for the experience level of our students coming into the course and how to tailor our instruction to the students. Over the two year period that I was an SGL, I observed the number responding positively drop from about half to only a couple in my last class of 64 captains. I also watched student performance in the tactics portion of the course degrade significantly even as we refined our instructional techniques and made the instruction more basic.

The most disheartening part of the situation was that several leaders contacted the school concerned because we were teaching conventional tactics at all. An engineer brigade commander said he didn’t care about teaching them high intensity conflict and only cared that they were prepared fro the current fight. I find this mindset to be quite short sighted and equally wrong as the senior leaders who wished COIN away as we left Vietnam. This approach would find us with battalion commanders who had never even considered a combined arms breach or deliberate attack, let alone conducted one, in ten years as these officers progress through their career.

The ECCC has taken great strides to teach COIN doctrine by building an entire planning module into the course that is focused on stability operations and counterinsurgency. This module fits into a tactical scenario that begins with deployment to and defense of a friendly country with a transition to the offense followed by stability operations in the formerly enemy country. It is a very important module that includes lethal and non-lethal operations at the battalion and company level that will help the students who will serve as company commanders shortly after graduation and deploy into combat.

The Army has come a long way by publishing the new FM 3-0 Operations, FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency, and FM 3-07 Stability Operations. It is absolutely the right decision for us to bring it on par with the offense and defense. However, we can not elevate COIN above the offense and defense in our education system because the operating force has already done so as units train for deployments. To do so would risk our Army experiencing even further degradation of our ability to conduct combined arms operations. Those skills were learned over years of education in the class room and the dusty fields of our bases and training centers. They do not come easily and they are very perishable if not practiced and reinforced.