Innovation or Inertia The strongUstrong.S. Military and the Learning of.pdfVIP

Innovation or Inertia: The U.S. Military and the Learning of Counterinsurgency by David Ucko David Ucko is Program Coordinator and Research Fellow at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He is the author of The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming U.S. Defense Policy for Modern Warfare , a forthcoming book examining the U.S. military’s learning of counterinsurgency and stability operations. Abstract: Following its encounter with insurgent violence in Iraq, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has sought to improve the U.S. military’s ability to conduct counterinsurgency. This effort suggests a potential turning-point in the history of the U.S. military, which has traditionally devoted its attention and resources to ‘‘high-intensity’’ or ‘‘conventional’’ combat. Given this institutional culture, what are now the prospects of the U.S. military ‘learning counterinsurgency ’? In many ways, the ongoing reorien- tation is promising and targeted, informed directly by the U.S. campaign in Iraq. At the same time, Pentagon priorities still reveal a remarkable resis- tance to change, and this in spite of the radically altered strategic environ- ment of the War on Terror. Given this intransigence – and the eventual fall- out from the troubled Iraq campaign – the ongoing learning of counter- insurgency might very well fail to produce the type of deep-rooted change needed to truly transform the U.S. military. Introduction he U.S. military has typically paid little attention to the nature T and requirements of counterinsurgency and stability operations. Missions pitting the U.S. military against insurgents, or forcing it into stabilization tasks and policing duties abroad, have tended to be dismissed as beyond the military’s remit or as ‘‘lesser-included’’ operations. The emphasis has instead be