Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq

Abstract

The Army has learned a great deal in Iraq and Afghanistan about the conduct of counterinsurgency operations, and we must continue to learn all that we can from our experiences in those countries. The insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan were not, in truth, the wars for which we were best prepared in 2001; however, they are the wars we are fighting and they clearly are the kind of wars we must master. America's overwhelming conventional military superiority makes it unlikely that future enemies will confront us head on. Rather, they will attack us asymmetrically, avoiding our strengths -- firepower, maneuver, technology -- and come at us and our partners the way the insurgents do in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is imperative, therefore, that we continue to learn from our experiences in those countries, both to succeed in those endeavors and to prepare for the future. Writing down observations and lessons learned is a time-honored tradition of Soldiers. In an effort to foster learning as an organization, the Army institutionalized the process of collection, evaluation, and dissemination of observations, insights, and lessons some 20 years ago with the formation of the Center for Army Lessons Learned. In subsequent years, the other military services and the Joint Forces Command followed suit, forming their own lessons learned centers. More recently, the Internet and other knowledge-management tools have sped the processes of collection, evaluation, and dissemination enormously. In this article, the author presents the distillation of 14 observations that he recorded while serving as Commander of the 101st Airborne Division and then Commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq and the NATO Training Mission-Iraq during the first 2-1/2 years of U.S. involvement in Iraq.

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