#Usmc insurgency manual#

Petraeus is an atypical general officer, holding a doctorate in international relations from Princeton University in addition to his Airborne Ranger qualifications.

#Usmc insurgency manual#

Work on a replacement manual began immediately but did not catch fire until October 2005, when Lieutenant General David Petraeus returned from his second tour in Iraq to assume command of CAC and take responsibility for all doctrinal development in the United States Army. The Doctrine Division of the Combined Arms Center (CAC) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, produced an interim Counterinsurgency Field Manual on October 1, 2004, designated Field Manual (Interim) 3-07.22. Civil War than they did about counterinsurgency.īelatedly recognizing the problem as the insurgency in Iraq developed, the Army hurriedly set out to remedy the situation.

It is not unfair to say that in 2003 most Army officers knew more about the U.S. The Army did not even have a common understanding of the problems inherent in any counterinsurgency campaign, as it had not studied such battles, digested their lessons, and debated ways to achieve success in counterinsurgency campaigns. It had not trained its soldiers that the key to success in counterinsurgency is protecting the population, nor had it empowered them with all of the political, diplomatic, and linguistic skills they needed to accomplish that objective. The Army therefore did not have all of the equipment it needed to protect its soldiers against the time-honored insurgent tactic of roadside bombs. When the Iraqi insurgency emerged the Army had not published a field manual on the subject of counterinsurgency for more than twenty years, since the wake of the El Salvador campaign. Doctrine drives decisions on how the Army should be organized (large heavy divisions or small military transition teams to embed in local security forces), what missions it should train to accomplish (conventional combat or counterinsurgency, or some balance between those two kinds of warfare), and what equipment it needs (heavy tanks supported by unarmored trucks for a conventional battlefield with front lines, or light armored vehicles to fight an insurgent enemy).Īlthough there are many reasons why the Army was unprepared for the insurgency in Iraq, among the most important was the lack of current counterinsurgency doctrine when the war began. Army doctrine provides a common language and a common understanding of how Army forces conduct operations.' Doctrine is thus enormously important to the United States Army it codifies both how the institution thinks about its role in the world and how it accomplishes that role on the battlefield. The Evolution of Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgencyĭoctrine is 'the concise expression of how Army forces contribute to unified action in campaigns, major operations, battles, and engagements. After the Vietnam War, we purged ourselves of everything that had to do with irregular warfare or insurgency, because it had to do with how we lost that war. It doesn't have any doctrine, nor was it educated and trained, to deal with an insurgency. Army was not as effective at learning as it should have been, and its failures in Vietnam had grave implications for both the Army and the nation.' Former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army General Jack Keane concurs, recently noting that in Iraq, 'We put an Army on the battlefield that I had been a part of for 37 years. Army, predisposed to fight a conventional enemy that fought using conventional tactics, overpowered innovative ideas from within the Army and from outside it. Chief of Staff of the Army General Peter Schoomaker has written that in Vietnam, 'The U.S. The story of how the Army found itself less than ready to fight an insurgency goes back to the Army's unwillingness to internalize and build upon the lessons of Vietnam. Army on a conventional battlefield, and who therefore chose to wage war against America from the shadows. It was, however, unprepared for an enemy who understood that it could not hope to defeat the U.S. The American Army of 2003 was organized, designed, trained, and equipped to defeat another conventional army indeed, it had no peer in that arena. Although there were lonely voices arguing that the Army needed to focus on counterinsurgency in the wake of the Cold War-Dan Bolger, Eliot Cohen, and Steve Metz chief among them-the sad fact is that when an insurgency began in Iraq in the late summer of 2003, the Army was unprepared to fight it.