Gendered micro-practices of counterinsurgency in the field

Because of the centrality of the civilian in counterinsurgency, gender relations are also inevitably transformed as the basis of counterinsurgency action. This works through demographics, through targeting of women specifically as counterbalancing forces to male radicalisation, through the cooptation of gendered spaces to counterinsurgency practice, and the use of gendered ‘telling’ to distinguish those who are to be protected from those who are to be feared or destroyed.

Gender demographics are here often invoked as both justification for targeting young men, and more instrumentally, for planning military action. ‘Youth bulges’, a demographic profusion of men between the ages of 15 and 30, especially in Muslim countries, is seen as a structural condition underlying extremism, and as a ‘problem’ to be addressed militarily in far away places. Young men are seen as an automatically useful resource for radical recruitment, and women's education and job-creation programmes are advocated as ‘necessary antidotes’.Footnote ²² This ostensible gender imbalance is utilised to demobilise militant groups. As a former US defence official wrote, ‘governments can use groups’ ambivalence about female members to state advantage. Israel and Russia use stories of socially marginal women being exploited by men to discredit terrorist groups and explain away female violence’.Footnote ²³ A more difficult route to countering the ostensible effects of the youth bulge is through economic development. Like a great deal of social science written in support of US counterinsurgencies in the 1960s,Footnote ²⁴ the contemporary material about nation-building inherits much from the modernisation theory advanced by Walt Rostow and his colleagues in the 1960s.Footnote ²⁵ Here, the salvation stage of liberal democracy requires economic development and one of the most prominent pathways of economic development is the socio-economic advancement of women.Footnote ²⁶ In this literature, women are essentialised as being less corrupt, more efficient, better for economic development, and less warlike.Footnote ²⁷ The feminised security discourse is deployed by all and sundry, and gender mainstreaming becomes even central to military intervention.Footnote ²⁸ Policymakers, for example, argue that by providing economic development specifically to suit women, women can be saved from alienation and thus radicalisation. Women are cast as wholly socio-economic beings, divested of politics or ethics. Under the heading of ‘Why the Military Should Care’ two US officers, both of them women, suggest that ‘by collaborating with USAID and using [Women in Development]'s expertise on gender integration as part of a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy, the military can more effectively address the negative socioeconomic conditions that make areas ripe for terrorist exploitation’.Footnote ²⁹ In a highly influential and much-circulated set of guidance notes, the counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen similarly argues that ‘coopting neutral or friendly women, through targeted social and economic programmes, builds networks of enlightened self-interest that eventually undermine the insurgents […] Win the women, and you own the family unit. Own the family, and you take a big step forward in mobilizing the population’ on the side of the counterinsurgents.Footnote ³⁰ Thus, advancing women's rights through modernisation is automatically seen as meeting the national security interests of the US. A significant element of counterinsurgency thus becomes provision of social services which are often allocated to women and are seen as another way in which counterinsurgency action can win over a local population into collaboration and loyalty. For example, a Rand analyst (and the wife of Bush Administration official Zalmay Khalilzad) writes that

In the field, counterinsurgency transforms the population it is intended to pacify into a human terrain which can be made visible, knowable, and malleable. The Human Terrain System (HTS) of the US military, for example, couples military officers with social scientists who are to interview the local populations, to understand not only their needs and wants, but also their kinship structures, the peculiarities of their gender relations, their way of living, their relationship with others around them, and beyond.Footnote ³² These specifically gendered structures of life are reified, fixed in time and space, mobilised as ‘useful facts’ about the civilian population, and transformed into military intelligence. For example, a paper produced by the Human Terrain System's research unit is specifically named after gendered kinship structures, ‘My Cousin's Enemy Is My Friend’, arguing that

Here, Pashtun kinship ties are taken as timeless facts to be contrasted to some idealised, homogenous, equally timeless ‘classical Middle Eastern tribal situation’ even as the paper again and again indicates that ‘tribal’ structures can and do vary across time and space. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, gender, familial, and kinship ties are seen as the bases of military strategy, whereby, different tribal structures can determine whether or not ‘surges’ of troops can be effective.Footnote ³⁴

Just as important, the very sites of counterinsurgency are usually civilian spaces that are then walled off (both figuratively and literally) as a sub-section of the battle-space, a grid square that can be more easily pacified. In counterinsurgency, all spaces, and perhaps especially urban quarters, are seen as potential battlegrounds by the counterinsurgents. The conventional privacy measures for homes and the peacefulness of everyday spaces are no longer guaranteed. Spaces often not only coded as feminine but also considered women's domain (homes, hospitals and schools especially) are frequently invaded by counterinsurgents.Footnote ³⁵ These ‘private’ or civilian spaces – the home, the school, the hospital, the market, the village – are increasingly targeted in modern wars, and in fact were specifically the object of intense bombing in conventional warfare in the twentieth century. What counterinsurgency does, however, is to try to transform these spaces without necessarily destroying them (although destruction – especially in the wake of population resettlement is often inevitable), thus coopting everyday spaces into the landscape of war. Inevitably, these everyday landscapes are inhabited by civilians who are also made to be figures in the ongoing counterinsurgency. The utilisation of these spaces in counterinsurgency is directly and intimately tied up with the ways in which counterinsurgency practice makes men and women legible and assigns them to different categories of various utility for combat and pacification.

Because counterinsurgency requires the categorisation of population into combatants and non-combatants, and because the easiest way to quickly identify and categorise populations as high-risk combatants or low-risk civilians is by gender, the combatant/non-combatant distinction becomes fully gendered, where the all-encompassing suspicion against all men is operationalised into specific actions (to be discussed below), while women are afforded the status of being ‘naïve’ objects of ‘protection’, pacification, and humanitarian salvage. We already know that this gendering produces a ‘masculinist logic of protection’,Footnote ³⁶ and that the object of military intervention, humanitarian aid, and primary focus of concern in a post-conflict environment becomes an undifferentiated ‘womenandchildren’.Footnote ³⁷ What counterinsurgency does is to transform the ‘womenandchildren’ into either actors considered by the counterinsurgent to be complicit with the combatants, a terrain upon whom the counterinsurgency's social engineering experiments can be performed, or, increasingly, as hostages and literal or symbolic message-bearers for the work of counterinsurgency. Importantly, given the paucity of distinguishing features between civilians and combatants, the gendered process of telling ‘womenandchildren’ from others becomes central to targeting processes in counterinsurgencies.Footnote ³⁸

In 2004, for example, a large number of Iraqi cities were either surrounded by barbed wire, under constant monitoring, or both. House invasions were often the norm. In these circumstances, women became direct targets of violence. They were taken as hostages to compel the men to surrender,Footnote ³⁹ their homes were destroyed, and they were specifically targeted because of a purportedly intuitive understanding of the enormity of attacking women and the ways in which such targeting could ‘send a message’ to others.Footnote ⁴⁰ In one instance, the US

Men are differentially targeted in these wars. In the cordoned cities where retinal scans, thumb prints, identity cards and registers of residence are used to monitor the populations,Footnote ⁴² men between the ages of 15 or 16 and 50 are considered the primary target of this intensive, aggressive, and invasive surveillance.Footnote ⁴³ As a US military oral history of Falluja recounted,

But despite their assertions, even young boys were not exempted from suspicion and monitoring. A re-evaluation of the fighting in Falluja by a military official asserted that

This targeting of men also conveniently serves another function. It allows for the soldiers to specifically effeminise the men of the population through both symbolic and practical emasculation. Such tactics include the undressing of men at checkpoints and in prisons and the use of language which is intended to dishonour men. This partially comes out of an orientalist understanding of what is considered honourable or shameful in ‘Muslim culture’ and which presents this culture's notions of indignity and abuse as exceptional.Footnote ⁴⁶ As a former US military interrogator recounts, the interrogators' cultural training, based on the infamous The Arab Mind by Rafael Patai, included such admonitions as ‘Men should not touch Arab women – female soldiers should avoid touching Arab men’,Footnote ⁴⁷ thus casting sexualised abuse as particularly abhorrent to Arabs, and in a sense reproducing orientalist gender stereotypes about the objects of counterinsurgency.

More broadly and perhaps in a less directly intentioned way, the requirements of counterinsurgency re-engineer the gendering of economic relations. Maya Rosenfeld's illuminating ethnography of the Deheisheh Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank shows that because of the strict limits placed on the movement of men, their ability to find jobs is severely curtailed. As women are subjected to a slightly less severe regime of controls, they can more easily find jobs, and keep their jobs. As such, the burden of labour is either shifted to women in a family (and sometimes even to the daughters in a family) or more equally divided, inevitably shifting the grounds of gender in particular ways that are not always positive.Footnote ⁴⁸ Working women who are forced to fend for their families under conditions of war and occupation – rather than a slow social transformation and self-sustaining mobilisation – are subjects of gossip, their youthful leisure is heavily circumscribed, their possibilities of further education is curtailed, and their labour is often exploited much more extensively. The men who have been thus sidelined suffer from depression and a loss of identity, and find themselves displaced. Because of necessity, such re-engineering also transforms unemployed men into willing conscripts into burgeoning security forces which often appear in such conditions of occupations, thus structurally reproducing the conditions of conflict.

The seam of imperial encounter

A more complicated set of gendering practices occurs not at the endpoint of application of counterinsurgency force, but at the seam of encounter between the occupying military forces and the people subjected to counterinsurgency. This seam is the messy interstitial space in which the cross-hatching of race, gender, class, and empire all produce unexpected hierarchical positioning.

Here, two groups in particular stand out: the women from the invading and occupying military and the local men who serve as the proxy enforcers of order for the invading military.

In the first instance, the displacement of inequalities to a neo-colonial setting suddenly inverts orders of hierarchy, and women from disadvantaged backgrounds can suddenly become powerful players positioned against and above local males. This inversion of hierarchies is reinforced by representing the arrested and incarcerated men as rapists and of the local male population as oppressors of their wives and families.Footnote ⁴⁹ As Anne McClintock has written in a different context,

The peculiarities of this positioning, where working class women from the least privileged parts of the US found themselves in positions of power vis-à-vis Iraqi men, has been best personified in the narratives about Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman. England and Harman have become iconic figures, symbolising the torture inflicted upon Iraqi men in the Abu Ghraib prison. The former held a leash encircling the neck of a naked Iraqi man curled up into a vulnerable foetal position; the latter had herself photographed smiling cherubically and giving a thumbs-up sign while leaning close to the dead body of a visibly bruised and battered Iraqi general. The US prison guards and interrogators who had inflicted pain upon Iraqi captives never managed to generate the same sense of disgust as England and Harman; they were never made the archetypes of US torture, nor their names were came to be known as universally as the two figures above. Not only were England and Harman the iconic representations of transgressive women, they were also subtly the embodiment of a new hierarchy of power, in which white women were automatically placed in superior position to men who in other circumstances would have been the expected superiors (as an Iraqi general's class position would be more privileged than that of a daughter of a police detective, Harman, or a poultry factory worker, England).

In the instances where women have been used as interrogators, their bodies and their sexuality have been deployed as technologies of power. In one of the most disturbing accounts of interrogations at the Guantánamo Bay prisons, a male interrogator writes about female interrogators using their breasts, their bodies, and their menstrual blood as necessary tools for achieving dictated aims. The narrative recounted is long, but strikingly persuasive in this regards:

The uncritical self-abnegation of the white interrogator woman in the service of some nationalist understanding of ‘national security’ is part of the peculiar gendering of counterinsurgency practices. In conventional wars where laws of war and the Geneva Conventions apply, such interrogations would not, could not, happen with the degree of legitimacy and sangfroid which seemed to have happened in the War on Terror.

Jessica Lynch's narrative similarly served to reproduce the hierarchies in which the Iraqis were portrayed as barbarians.Footnote ⁵² Here, she was at once the heroic white woman rising well above the savage men who captured her (and possibly raped her, as some accounts have had it), and a damsel in distress whose rescue by even more heroic Special Forces men again instantiated the virtuous superiority of the invaders over the depraved occupied men. Interestingly, race here plays a multiple role, because as others have shown, the four men and the other woman who were also captured at the same time could not serve as the iconic representations of American virtue in the same way. A woman's body was needed, and a white one: the other captured woman was a ‘black single mother […], a body already marked as illegitimate within the USA's racialized politics, and indeed a body marked as not even worth saving in the recasting of the story’.Footnote ⁵³

A much more banal representation of this seam of encounter, and perhaps in many respects more important because more pervasive, has been the ease with which women have moved into combat roles, serving the empire unquestioningly, with their integration into these roles being celebrated as some form of liberationist politics. A (male) Lieutenant Colonel in the Army writes

Thus, a gendered body becomes a necessary, indeed desired, adjunct or accessory to an asymmetrical war of conquest and occupation. The gendered body serves the functions of counterinsurgency – the ‘humanitarian’, ostensibly ‘softer’, tasks that are required to ensure the winning of hearts and minds – much more efficiently and effectively. Celebratory accounts of such integration,Footnote ⁵⁵ or even critical analyses which see the participation of women in acts of collective violence as an instantiation of agency,Footnote ⁵⁶ ignore the fact that the equal opportunity to enter combat in the service of empire does not necessarily have agential or liberatory functions. When ‘women join men in the work of objectifying and psychologically annihilating the “enemy”, finding ways to “effeminize” him, if he is a man’Footnote ⁵⁷ they essentially help reproduce a geopolitical dominance in which the ostensible gender equality in the imperial metropole reinforces racial hierarchies in the conquered and occupied colonies and peripheries.

A second space in the seam of encounter where genders are inflected through racial, class, or imperial hierarchies is the site of encounter between the US military men and the local security forces who act as proxies for the conquering military.Footnote ⁵⁸ Training and developing indigenous police and military forces is a central tenet of counterinsurgency. The tasks here include ‘developing a US-style training base, embedding advisors, initiating an intensive collective training programme, and partnering American units with indigenous units’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet the local men, who often risk opprobrium, and who often join the security forces as a way of guaranteeing a livelihood in conditions where security is the only steady sort of income, are constantly berated, ‘effeminised’, called ‘women’ or ‘pussies’, and seen as inadequate and passive enforcers of good order by their trainers.

Here, masculinity alone does not form the basis of transnational solidarity, and again, gender hierarchies are strongly shaded by other factors, such as ‘class, “race”/ethnicity, language and religion, subcultures, sexualities and almost any other form through which humans understand difference, and strive to make it count’.Footnote ⁶⁰

According to this logic, if a member of the local security forces does not fight a war to which he does not necessarily have an allegiances, his manhood is considered to be impaired. In an account of the US assault on Falluja, a commander of the 1st Marine Regiment considers Iraqi policemen and Civil Defense Corps troops who fled the devastation of that city to be inferior and effeminised: ‘When are these people going to discover their manhood and stand and fight with us to save their city?’Footnote ⁶¹ In this view, working for an occupying force is what allows a man his masculinity, but sometimes even this acquiescence to domination does not suffice. Where more circumspect officers speak of a lack of maturity for an indigenous security force which does not perform as the imperial military expects it,Footnote ⁶² videos circulating on online sites have shown a much more overtly gendered conversation between a US Marine trainer and Iraqi security forces. The former questions the loyalty of the latter, and then calls them ‘bunch of women’, ‘pussies’, and ‘cowards’, ‘too much of a fucking woman to die for his country’, lacking a backbone and yet ‘killing Americans’ and refusing to fight insurgents. When an Iraqi sneers at him, the marine challenges him to ‘going out back and having his little ass being beaten’.Footnote ⁶³

In a context where a proxy force fights for an imperial one, the gendering of these proxy forces can take two different paths, which nevertheless share common characteristics. On the one hand, the colonial discourse surrounding ‘martial races’ envisioned fighters in the service of empire who are ‘naturally’ fiercer fighters, more disciplined and fearless warriors, and thus far more masculine in their bearing and representation. The Kenyan Masai, the Nepalese Gurkhas, the Afghan Pathans (or Pashtuns), the Indian Sikhs, and the Scottish Highlanders have all been considered martial races. Heather Streets writes,

The other way in which such colonial war-fighting is gendered is through the effeminisation of the colonised man. Here, as McClintock writes with regards to Africans, ‘the white race was figured as the male of the species and the black race as the female’, while elsewhere, ‘imperial conquest was [seen] as a natural expression of masculinity’ which then meant that the conquered were naturalised as feminine, conquered, penetrated, and possessed.Footnote ⁶⁵

Although this may seem in the first glance contradictory, a certain set of familiar tropes actually connect the two discourses to one another: a notion of loyalty to the conquering empire representing a degree of masculinity, the necessity to distinguish the ‘the proper man and the dissipated unmanned’,Footnote ⁶⁶ and a distinct conflation of masculinity with particular notions of sexuality. As Levine has shown the ‘oversexed native’ who lacks courage, independence, and moral vigour – all masculine virtues – is portrayed as ‘the polygamist, the masturbator, the whorer, and the sexually fluid’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Loyalty and military service to the empire is intended to redeem him from this moral degeneracy. In the context of the War on Terror, the men who are located in the seam of encounter are cast in these seemingly contradictory ways: they can be at once courageous and manly allies and sodomising homosexual rapists. A particularly revealing account from a former US military man stationed in Afghanistan contains all the relevant tropes:

The Pashtun – or the warrior allies – in this narrative are compared to ‘dogs’ and effeminised not only because of the sexual acts of which the masculine US marines disapprove, but also because they hold each other's hand and ‘repulse’ Westerners with their homosociality. Even the story, as it told, draws on masculine and feminine images: a ‘gigantic Marine’ stands for unspoiled American masculinity, while an ‘indignant’ Pashtun ‘flipped his scarf’ over a shoulder, invoking clichéd imagery of petulant teenage girls flipping their hair in exasperation.

The seam of encounter then is the place where class, race, and gender are brought together most urgently, with masculinities always hitched to a particular kind of sexuality, and an iterative ordering of hierarchies is constantly performed. Here, underprivileged working class women of the US can transcend the shackles of their gender and class, as long as they weaponise their own bodies and sexualities, and where indigenous men are made to ‘know their place’ in this hierarchy via a strictly observed code of behaviour which always sees them as effeminate, degenerate, cowardly, and backwards, unless – but often not even when – they throw their lot in with the occupying military, serving them as local police forces.

The counterinsurgent women and the soldier-scholars of the metropole

While gendering works in familiar, even predictable, ways in the conquered spaces and at the seam of encounter between counterinsurgency forces and the indigenous men and women, gendering of counterinsurgency becomes much more fluid and sometimes unpredictable in the metropole, where policies are formulated, ideologies are articulated, and wars are planned and legitimated.

Two ways in which counterinsurgency practice and discourse has become gendered in the metropole have been most striking: on the one hand, the creation of a new counterinsurgent masculinity – that of the soldier-scholar – and on the other hand, the appropriation of a colonial feminist discourse and its saturating of counterinsurgency discourse by women bureaucrats and policymakers who explicitly elide their counterinsurgency credentials to their gendered identities.

In analysing masculinities, Terrell Carver has written that ‘the rational-bureaucratic modern man is not so distant from the warrior-protector man of tradition, in that organized warfare and organized trade are not as conceptually, constitutively and practically distant as one is led to think. Indeed, in terms of the revolving doors between government officials (elected and non-elected) and the arms trade and so-called defence industries, combined with the technologized nature of contemporary “civilized” warfare (as opposed to supposed “terrorism”), it would seem that the two masculinities are effectively merged’.Footnote ⁶⁹ In a sense, this applies to the soldier-scholar masculinity as well, but as important are the subtle transformations and differences in the notion of masculinity that class brings in.

The soldier-scholars are numerous and now well-known. They are also overwhelmingly represented in the ranks of the counterinsurgents. David Petraeus (PhD in International Relations), David Kilcullen (PhD in Political Science), John Nagl (PhD in History), H. R. McMaster (PhD in History), and Andrew Exum (a soon-to-be-completed PhD in War Studies) are all vocal, articulate, and highly educated military (or ex-military) men, all of whom are ranked above captain, all of whom are engaged in policymaking vis-à-vis the War on Terror, and all of whom are enthusiastic counterinsurgents. Some have written influential books and articles on counterinsurgency, others have been online or think tank presences pushing forward a counterinsurgency agenda, while Petraeus first directed the US war effort in Iraq and now leads the US Central Command. The soldier-scholars all advance a notion of war-fighting which ostensibly takes into account political nuances, aims to win over civilian populations, and deploys an openly liberal discourse of salvation and humanitarianism. Not only is the soldier-scholar the ultimate in civic virtue, he is also the embodiment of international wisdom, war-fighting prowess, and a kind of knowingness about the world.Footnote ⁷⁰ This transformation in the notion of masculinity is reflected in blogs and ad hoc writing produced about counterinsurgency. The counterinsurgents want to be ‘soldiers’ and find the term ‘warrior’ troubling. Thus, when Nathan Sassaman calls himself ‘the Warrior King’, he and his book are roundly criticised by the counterinsurgents.Footnote ⁷¹

Even the official discourse around counterinsurgency reflects this shift. The US Army and Marine Corps' counterinsurgency field manual compares a regular fighter to that ultimate icon of raw physical masculinity: a pugilist who is nevertheless blind and is wasting energy flailing at unseen opponents and perhaps causing unintended harm.Footnote ⁷² Access to military intelligence, on the other hand, transforms the counterinsurgent into ‘surgeons cutting out cancerous tissue while keeping other vital organs intact’.Footnote ⁷³ On the one hand, we have the wholly corporeal presence of the boxer; on the other, the precise intellect of the surgeon. The theoreticians of counterinsurgency obviously prefer the latter. Not only does this counter-positioning of boxers and surgeons contain an implicit notion of masculinity, perhaps even more importantly, it hides within plain sight a particular gradation of class. The boxer is the working class hero; the surgeon the upper middle class professional. The former is emotional, embodied, perhaps even irrational; the latter is intellectual, cool, steady-handed.

The soldier-scholar is particularly well-suited to the liberal interventionist model which sees its job as cautiously and pragmatically doing the biddings of the US national interest. Soldier-scholars are not interested in chest-thumping gestures, deploy the language of ‘hearts and minds’ much more readily and see their wont as being the wielders of softer or smarter power. Old school warriors see counterinsurgency and the entire family of stability operations to which it belongs as a diminishment of the inherent masculinity of the military:

Notwithstanding the grumblings of conventional war-fighters, with the re-emergence of the liberal interventionist doctrines of the Obama administration, the soldier-scholars are on the ascendance.

Alongside this new form of masculinity, a much more familiar colonial feminism is crucial in advancing a particularly new form of metropolitan warrior femininity. The colonial feminism of today deploys the language of humanitarian rescue.Footnote ⁷⁵ A ‘feminized security rhetoric has become commonplace in the administration, so much so that it is typical for an official who gives a speech about American actions in Iraq and Afghanistan or about the US policy of promoting democracy around the world to draw the connection to the pursuit of women's rights.’Footnote ⁷⁶ This colonial feminism even admonishes ‘the terrorists’ for not picking women. A former Pentagon official complains that ‘In the years since [Leila] Khaled's hijackings, women's involvement in Palestinian terrorism has been either inconsistent or invisible. Even after proving their success as hijackers, bombers, and cover for men, women have to remind terrorist leaders of their tactical usefulness.’Footnote ⁷⁷ This colonial feminism is appealing to a new category of women policymakers who pride themselves in a kind of collaborative warrior femininity. These counterinsurgent women not only deploy a gendered analysis in their discussion of counterinsurgency – ‘these type of operations require very perceptive and deep emotional IQs’, and ‘women have a more collaborative style’ – but also use feminist justifications for their involvement: ‘we aren't going to win by telling half the population they can't play’.Footnote ⁷⁸

The counterinsurgent women have been particularly crucial in creating or sustaining the ‘humanitarian’ elements of the War on Terror. The Human Terrain System, for example, was originally conceived by a counterinsurgent woman, Montgomery McFate, who wrote her doctoral thesis in cultural anthropology on British counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland, and who was for a while a highly visible figure, both as target of US anthropologists’ anger, and as a fashionable and über-feminine policy wonkFootnote ⁷⁹ who idolises military men – she even anonymously ran a blog titled iluvamaninauniform. McFate, in becoming a fellow at the Office of Naval Research, shed her nose-ring, ‘realizing “there were certain semiotic cues” that would unnerve “paranoidal old white men”’.Footnote ⁸⁰ She found no contradiction between her awareness of the gender differences of ‘old white men’ and ‘counterinsurgent women’ and the particularly militarist role that she envisioned for social scientists.

As significant are the new category of women security scholars who circulate between the domains of academy, think tanks and the policymaking world. Some of these women have been prominent over the last decade. Sarah Sewall is, in addition to having formerly headed the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University and having been the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping during the Clinton administration, has authored the foreword to the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.Footnote ⁸¹ Samantha Power, a strong advocate of humanitarian military intervention and the author of a book about Rwanda is currently advisor and speech-writer for President Barak Obama, and was involved in drafting his controversial Nobel speech in defence of US counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Similarly, the authors of the foreword and introduction to the US Army Stability Operations Field Manual are also women, Michèle Flournoy and Janine Davidson respectively.Footnote ⁸² Flournoy is currently the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy at the Obama Pentagon and was a founder of Center for a New American Security, an influential security think tank which has been a vocal advocate of counterinsurgency and the home of many mid-level Obama defence officials. Davidson was in the Bush Pentagon's Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict and Special Capabilities Directorate and is the first Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Plans in the Obama Pentagon.

Among these women who combine a liberal interventionist ideology with comfort with security-speak, a curious elision of femininity to a kind of hetero-normative sexuality is present. The images of the counterinsurgent women shows them as feminine, dressed in ball gowns, kissing their counterinsurgent officers, all the while flaunting their warrior credentials (one counterinsurgent woman has been a former air force pilot, the other a professor at the US Marine Corps University). Others work in the Pentagon in various – and often influential – positions.

They are also increasingly present in the field of military operation. Two women in particular are worth mentioning here: Sarah Chayes, advisor to General McChrystal in Afghanistan, and Emma Sky, advisor to General Odierno in Iraq. Neither women have ever spoken openly about gender, or feminism, or the ways in which their being women may have influenced their work and their political decisions. Yet, they both embody a kind of intersection of particular class, gender, and ‘racial’ positionings, in a particular imperial context which makes them clear embodiments of the new gender dynamics of counterinsurgency.

Both women come from non-military backgrounds; Chayes the daughter of liberal Democrats who worked closely with President Kennedy; Sky, of a middle-class background which provided her with private secondary education. Before their careers as advisors to the military commanders of Afghanistan and Iraq, Chayes was a journalist, Sky a development specialist working with the British Department for International Development and the British Council. Both received their educations in elite universities (Harvard and Oxford respectively), and both have learned to speak the predominant language of the country in which they are advisors (Sky speaks Arabic and Hebrew; Chayes has had tutoring in Arabic, but has learned Pashto in Afghanistan). Both their previous work has had ‘anthropological’ elements, requiring close and intimate knowledge of the indigenous people amongst whom they have worked. Both are often described in vocabulary that emphasises their femininity: Chayes is tall and ‘stylish’; Sky is ‘petite’ (but according to Andrew Exum's counterinsurgency blog ‘one of those tough, intrepid women the old British Empire excels at producing’).Footnote ⁸³ They both have assumed a kind of a ‘drag’: While living in Afghanistan, Sarah Chayes decided to wear men's clothing, as a ‘lifestyle choice’.Footnote ⁸⁴ On one blog post someone writes about the ease with which Sky changes tires – that manliest of manly tasks.Footnote ⁸⁵

Both these humanitarian workers, with their backgrounds of privilege and their education, training, and experience in humanitarian development work have become convinced of the good offices of the military. On the one hand, they represent the ‘soft’ feminised notion of politics: development work, NGO work, reconciliation work, all posts that are often considered soft, emotional, and womanly, and which are all too frequently populated by women also. Yet they both see in the ‘new’ way of war, that is, the population-centric counterinsurgency Odierno and McCrystal are fighting, a space for their experience. Sky, described as a modern day Gertrude Bell,Footnote ⁸⁶ sees her advisory job as having a position of influence, and speaks of loving the US Military: ‘she thinks the military is better than the country it protects. “That's the way I feel about it – America doesn't deserve its military”’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Chayes describes the US military as ‘public-spirited’ and ‘doing its darnedest to do the right thing’.Footnote ⁸⁸ There is even a familiar element of ‘screwball romance’ in the way the pairs McCrystal-Chayes and Odierno-Sky are portrayed. The women come across as frank and sassy companions who don't hesitate to talk back.

In these pairings, the gendering becomes most clear: if the soldiers on the ground, the working class, racialised, or underprivileged are expected to act according to their station (even if that station is juggled through the imperial reorderings that place a working class white US woman superior to an Iraqi general), the privileged middle – and upper-class officers and policymakers so clearly represented here portray a kind of metropolitan imperial gendering: the softer masculinity of the soldier-scholar and the tough warrior femininity of the development/counterinsurgent specialist meet comfortably in the middle, serving the empire in the guise of a liberal, even ‘progressive’, gender positioning.