This is promising news
Armys Next Crop of Generals Forged in Counterinsurgency - washingtonpost.com
An Army board headed by Gen. David H. Petraeus has selected several combat-tested counterinsurgency experts for promotion to the rank of brigadier general, sifting through more than 1,000 colonels to identify a handful of innovative leaders who will shape the future Army, according to current and former senior Army officers.
The list of those promoted includes H.R. McMaster who while not in Iraq working with Petraeus has been a fellow at the International Institute of Strategic Studies. If you’ve access to Survival (the esteemed journal of the IISS) have a look at Vol. 50, No. 1 (February 2008 ) where McMaster has a fine article ‘On War: Lessons to be Learned’. Abstract:
Since 1991, thinking about defence has been based on a fantastical theory about the character of future war rather than a clear vision of emerging threats to national and international security. A thorough study of contemporary conflict in historical perspective is needed to correct flawed thinking about the character of conflict, help define future challenges to international security, and build military and civilian governmental capabilities to meet those challenges. Recent and ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and southern Lebanon reveal that military campaigns must be subordinate to a larger strategy that integrates political, military, diplomatic, economic and strategic communication efforts. Military forces must abandon the illusion that technology can solve the problem of future conflict. Leaders should also abandonthe belief that wars can be waged efficiently with a minimalist approach to the commitment of forces and other resources.
Actually that whole issue is just crackling with good articles including the third in a series on strategy by Hew Strachan ‘Strategy and the Limitation of War’. Abstract:
Strategic theory has failed to provide the tools with which to examine the conflicts now being waged. Major war is the preferred vehicle for the development of strategy, as the issues are absolute, the role of contingency diminished and the play of policy less overt. But a phenomenon increasingly remote from the actual experience of war does not provide a sufficient template for the current debate on strategy. The result is a discussion in flux, without unifying themes or coherence. The labels we currently attach to lesser wars, such as low-intensity operations, irregular war or counter-insurgency warfare, define themselves by their means, not their ends. Governments talk about major war but provide the means only for small war. Having set out with political goals that were unrealisable, they have not adjusted those goals but focused on military solutions which lack a political end. So the application of military capabilities becomes, by default, an end in itself.
