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Beyond Counterinsurgency: Why the Concept is Failing
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By Thomas Braun
Introduction
The changing face of modern warfare is revealed nowhere more clearly than in asymmetric surroundings where traditional approaches do not succeed anymore. Military forces are encountering numerous opponents who no longer consist largely of identifiable combatants, but rather are irregular fighters who live among and within the population, making them extremely difficult to identify. Although uprisings and insurgencies are not new developments, the military’s capacity to combat them was neglected in doctrinal thinking at the beginning of the twenty-first century. New trends and challenges and the rethinking of military combat operations, as well as the development of insights regarding a comprehensive approach, led to the re-creation of counterinsurgency doctrine. The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Field Manual 3-24, titled simply Counterinsurgency (hereafter, FM 3-24), was written during the most recent conflict in Iraq. This process was largely driven by General David Petraeus. But the United States’ counterinsurgency strategy has shown disappointing results in Afghanistan, and critics are already calling for new approaches. Six years after the publication of FM 3-24 frustration is widespread that the current counterinsurgency approach in Afghanistan is not proving to be the panacea that it was promised to be. From the U.S. perspective, the topic becomes even more important, as counterinsurgency is “the strategy through which the United States has expended the greatest level of military resources since September 11, 2001.”