- - - - 5/28/12

West Point Is Divided on a War Doctrine’s Fate

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

Faculty at the United States Military Academy are debating what a counterinsurgency strategy gained in Iraq and Afghanistan and whether the doctrine has a future.

"Now, as American troops head home from Afghanistan, where the new strategy will be a narrow one of hunting insurgents, the arguments at West Point are playing out in war colleges, academic journals and books, and will be for decades. (The argument has barely begun over whether violence came down in Iraq in 2007 because of the American troop increase or the Anbar Awakening, when Sunni tribes turned against the insurgency.) To Col. Gregory A. Daddis, a West Point history professor, the debate is also about the role of the military as the war winds down. “We’re not really sure right now what the Army is for,” he said.

To officers like Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster, much of the debate presents a false either-or dilemma. General McMaster, who used counterinsurgency to secure the Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005 and returned recently from Kabul as head of a task force fighting corruption, said that without counterinsurgency, “There’s a tendency to use the application of military force as an end in itself.”

To John Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who fought in Iraq, wrote a book about counterinsurgency and now teaches at the United States Naval Academy, American foreign policy should “ensure that we never have to do this again.”

Does counterinsurgency work? “Yes,” he said. “Is it worth what you paid for it? That’s an entirely different question.”"

All quiet on this western front.  The European indexes are down. The American are closed.  The orient is up.  Spain dreams fondly of Franco.
Bankia is in limbo. I assume the ECB said no.