A U.S. Army colonel and West Point history professor said that there's something wrong in the modern-day counterinsurgency tactics currently being used in today’s military.
Col. Gian Gentile wrote in his book, "Wrong Turn, America ’s Deadly Embrace of Counter-Insurgency," that attempting to win the trust and allegiance of foreign populations will often lead to death and destruction, instead of “protecting” those civilians.
Gentile said that the goal of Counterinsurgency (COIN) is to win-over the local population by providing them with tangible benefits of the occupation of military forces. This could be roads, schools, and establishing banks and security forces. By creating this infrastructure, the belief is that the military would then be able to tell insurgents from supporters, making them better targets for military action.
But, Gentile said he believes that COIN has simply transformed the U.S. military into an establishment of long-term nation building as its main goal.
“Nation building at the barrel of a gun," he said.
Although the nation-building efforts could be commendable, the cost is prohibitive and the theory rarely becomes reality, he said.
Instead, Gentile concludes the theory just doesn't work.
“It becomes a problem of strategic overreach, which produces a strategic mismatch, where in the end, the objectives, while important, never really seem to rise to the level of the commitment that the U.S. made in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan," he said.
Gentile is a former Iraq War commander and a contributor to the Washington Post and The Atlantic.
