In this ambitious corrective, M. L. R. Smith and David Martin Jones seek to lay out a critique of, and alternative to, modern counterinsurgency (COIN) theory. In their account, this theory has its roots in the French experiences (read: losses) in Vietnam and Algeria and the British successes (arguably) in Malaysia and Northern Ireland. Revived post 9–11 in the works of (inter alia) John Nagl and David Kilcullen, COIN found its apogee in the Army Counterinsurgency Manual (FM 3–24) of 2006 and the Iraq “Surge” of 2006–7 (full disclosure: in which I played a part) before losing some luster in the wake of the less successful Afghanistan “Surge” of 2009–2011.

Over the course of six highly readable chapters, Smith and Martin make four major points. First, insurgency as a subcategory of war is a hard term “to pin down with analytical precision” (p. 180). On this point, the authors go even further, stating that any attempt at establishing any subcategory in this genre is futile, as “[t]here is just war” (p. 5), repeating a phrase often intoned by other strategic theorists, such as Colin Gray. Second, the COIN literature seems obsessed with tactical technique. The authors believe that COIN maintains there are core methods and principles that “if correctly applied…always promise success” (p. 181). Third, COIN theory is deeply ideological and tied to modernization theory, to such a degree that “along the road of nation building lay the happy end of history” (p. 182). Finally, the authors find the use of mythologizing in COIN literature quite disturbing. In their account, myths “distort[s] historical understanding, ignore[s] contingency and obscure[s] complexity” (p. 183).

Stepping back to make a broader critique, the authors find that “COIN is symptomatic of a fallacy at the heart of much Western social inquiry, which is the attempt to impose a structure on contingent conditions of the past that were never present at the time and never will be in the future” (p. 184). Instead, the authors try to direct us to their interpretation of Carl von Clausewitz, whom they summarize as theorizing: “all wars are unique to their time and place, conditioned as they are by the unpredictable forces of passion, chance, and reason” (p. 185).

At a meta-level, this is a truth that approaches truism. Yes, each war is individual and unique, a violent political phenomenon never before seen and never to be repeated. Of course, this is equally true of almost all political phenomena and could be posited with equal validity about (e.g.) demonstrations, political campaigns, revolutions, and regimes. It does not follow from the truth of the uniqueness of a phenomenon that categories cannot have utility. War, as a category, can be bracketed from political campaigns as a category, even though there may be mass political aspects of the former, and violent aspects of the latter. Likewise, it does not follow that subcategories may not also have utility, so long as they are recognized as constructs for particular purposes and not Platonic forms (the confusion of which is a perennial danger).

So while the authors’ claim that war is war and that politics is always intrinsic to war is unassailable, it does not follow from this that we cannot categorize wars based on how the political manifests itself in the conduct of the war. Or put more simply, while a theorist may have the luxury of maintaining that “war is war,” the practitioner is required to make finer distinctions in order to shape an operational approach and impose a logic on the sequences of battles. The need to deal with the political in a very different manner was at least a motivating impulse behind the counterinsurgency “movement,” such as it was. To oversimplify, the Army of the 1980s and 1990s had optimized itself for wars in which the political nature of war was difficult to discern on the battlefield. When one’s opponent in a war puts the bulk of his forces into uniform and arrays them on a battlefield, this makes the political aspects of the war less immediate, placing the conduct of combat in the realm of military professionals, far away (optimally) from the civilian populations on both sides. Illustratively, while politics was very present in the Second World War, there were political interactions on neither Omaha Beach nor Hurtgen Forest, or at least none visible to those doing the fighting there. Nor would there have been political interaction at the Battle for the Fulda Gap for which the post-Vietnam Army optimized itself, as one army fought another on a more or less open field. These were—or would have been—exchanges of a purely military nature. Soldiers in high-intensity firefights are there to fight and win and let the politics take care of itself in the aftermath of the win—or loss.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (here conflated, despite being very different themselves) brought to the fore the lesson (earlier learned, to varying degrees, in Panama, Somalia, and the Balkans) that there are wars in which the actions of small units may have political implications that impact the outcome of the war, independent of the more easily measured battle results, perhaps to the extent that a clear win in a battle may be overshadowed by a political loss engendered by other factors. Put most simply, this is because the war is conducted “amongst the people” (the phrase appears in Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force, 2005). Again, each of these wars is different, and the ways in which political effects are generated, have impact, and might be measured are unique to each. Nonetheless, the difference between a war in which the practitioner has to be mindful of political impact because his operations are intermingled with the populace and one in which such concerns are reserved to capitals is a useful one—at least for said practitioner. A modest defense of sub-categories seems required here.

This is not to say that categories or subcategories cannot be abused and mythologized, and on this score, much of the scorn that the authors direct at COIN and its proponents is valid, or at least understandable. But none of this takes away from the practical motives of the theorist-practitioners who brought the original insights—albeit often in primitive form and usually wrapped in bad theory and/or faulty extrapolation—to the fore.

Finally, the authors seem to misunderstand how ideas and warfare interact—a troubling defect in military theorists. Yes, COIN theory was quickly codified and pushed to the field as doctrine, in the form of FM 3–24, where it was then given the same short shrift that military doctrine is always given in warfare, at least in the American case. FM 3–24, while useful in many ways, was obsolete before it “hit the street,” as the innovation that it both reflected and inspired did not freeze in place after its publication. I know of no practitioner who saw the COIN manual as anything other than a reference to be plundered for good ideas. To maintain that it was some kind of blueprint for action is a serious misreading of military history. The manual certainly emerged too late to have any other than the most peripheral impact on the 2006–2007 Baghdad “Surge,” though this political-military phenomenon drew on much of the same source material.

In short, Smith and Jones perhaps undercut their project by taking the various checklists in COIN literature (n.b. Armies like checklists) more seriously than did the end users for whom they were intended. Were they to read the COIN phenomenon as a corrective to an Army that was optimized for a different subcategory of war, rather than as a project to be substantiated per se, they might better understand what occurred. This better understanding might have taken the authors down a path of refinement and revision, not rejection.

This is perhaps the overriding critique of Smith and Jones. They see the rise of “modern counterinsurgency thinking” as a purely academic exercise, rather than the political phenomenon that it was. The publication of FM 3–24 in 2006 (Stephen Biddle, Stathis N. Kalyvas, Wendy Brown, and Douglas A. Ollivant. 2008. “The New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual as Political Science and Political Praxis,” Review Symposium. Perspectives on Politics 6(2): 347–60.) was much less about substantiating some timeless truth of military theory and far more about gaining political time and space for the Army to bring about an acceptable outcome in Iraq (read: one that could be plausibly portrayed as something other than a loss). Perversely for a book of political science, this book misses the concrete political context in which COIN emerged. Better attention to the political would bring about a more comprehensive account.