Policy guides, including field manuals, tend to be based on an intuitive rather than explicit or theoretical understanding of the issues with which they deal. The Counterinsurgency Field Manual issued jointly by the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps is no exception, which suggests the two questions motivating this review essay: What theory of counterinsurgency underpins the manual's analysis? And what kind of social and political theory informs its theory of counterinsurgency?

In this essay, I identify the manual's intellectual foundations and lay out their implications. First, I point out that the manual is derived from classic counterinsurgency texts of the 1960s and has much more in common with older theories of revolution than recent research in political science; I argue that this makes sense given the manual's goals. Second, I identify the theory underpinning it as constructivist and point to a key problem, namely, the conceptualization of politics as “high politics” and the concomitant downgrading of local politics into a fuzzy understanding of culture and social structure, which is effectively bracketed off.

What theory of counterinsurgency underpins the analysis? The answer is fairly straightforward. The manual breaks little new ground. Beyond a substantial dose of practical, technical instructions on operational matters, such as “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations,” “designing counterinsurgency campaigns,” and the like, this is an elaboration and reformulation of a body of work that emerged in the 1960s, primarily in response to anticolonial or communist insurgencies in such places as colonial Algeria or Malaya. Overall, there is little in the manual that is new—its substance can be found in such counterinsurgency classics as David Galula's Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (Reference Galula1964), Frank Kitson's Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping (Reference Kitson1971), Robert Thompson's Defeating Communist Insurgency (Reference Thompson1966), or Roger Trinquier's Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency (Reference Trinquier1964).Footnote ¹ These earlier works conceptualized insurgencies as revolutionary movements based on mass mobilization (i.e., peoples' wars), and devised methods of response that integrated specific military and political strategies—with a heavy stress on the former.

What are the main precepts of the theory of counterinsurgency championed by the manual? On the military front, the goal is to identify and eliminate key local insurgents while establishing effective population control so as to sever the relation between the insurgents and the population they claim to represent. Once this has been achieved, political objectives kick in; they boil down to political reforms that render government more efficient and responsive, hence, more “legitimate.” In short, this is a strategy of competitive state building combining targeted, selective violence and population control, on the one hand, with the dissemination of a credible mass ideology, the creation of modern state structures, the imposition of the rule of law, and the spurring of economic development, on the other.

In practice, however, the theoretical “primacy of the political” has proved elusive in most cases; winning “hearts and minds” and promoting economic development and political reform often takes the back seat to the application of violence and the establishment of control. In some cases, the “correct” application of violence proves enough to defeat the insurgency and consolidate state control (think Sendero Luminoso in Peru or the recent Chechen insurgency). In other cases, however, the military success of counterinsurgency is undone less by the inability to introduce the right reforms and more by much broader political developments, as indicated by the cases of the Algerian insurgency against the French and of the Vietnam War. The manual does acknowledge this possibility, especially through its discussion of Vietnam, thus implicitly recognizing that despite the correct application of counterinsurgency principles, the mission may fail because of political dynamics located outside the issues covered.Footnote ² To use the medical metaphor favored by the manual (pp. 153–54), insurgencies may well go through three stages (“stop the bleeding,” “inpatient care—recovery,” and “outpatient care—move to self-sufficiency”), but each stage, and especially the last one, may create the illusion of recovery while hiding a major relapse.Footnote ³ This bracketing-out of politics is a problem to which I return later.

In contrast to the classic counterinsurgency literature, the manual betrays zero impact by political science research. This is so for two main reasons. First, political scientists have, with few exceptions, refrained from studying how to design successful counterinsurgency campaigns, turning their gaze instead on the causes of civil wars,Footnote ⁴ their duration, termination, and the postconflict reconstruction. Second, political scientists, including large-n practitioners, have failed so far to produce startling results. I doubt that the most robust finding of the econometric literature, namely, that poor countries face a higher risk of civil war, would have impressed (or been of much use to) the manual's writers.Footnote ⁵ Not surprisingly, perhaps, there is little in the manual on a key theme of recent research, the supposedly central role of natural resources. In fact, the authors not only ignore recent political science research but contradict a great deal of it: It is squarely located within the “grievance” line of thinking, which has been shunned by many researchers who have privileged, instead, “greed” interpretations. Indeed, the manual associates insurgencies with mass mobilization and asks counterinsurgents to address popular grievances. Clearly, the theory of counterinsurgency that informs the manual speaks to theories of insurgency that have much more in common with the older literature on revolutions (from Mao Zedong to Eric Wolf (Reference Wolf1969) and Barrington Moore (Reference Moore1966)) than with recent political science research.

This is not to say, however, that the manual is not a social-scientific enterprise. Quite the contrary. Though recognizing that every insurgency is contextual and presents its own set of challenges, it espouses a definitively nomothetic posture, adopting a unified framework that sees these differences as variations on a single theme. It thus focuses on the common or universal characteristics of all insurgencies. Yet, at the same time, it is also clear to the careful reader that the authors had two overarching cases in the back of their heads: Vietnam and Iraq—both instances of the type of case that inspired the counterinsurgency literature so central to the manual—namely, revolutionary/nationalist insurgencies. In other words, it is written primarily for a specific type of situation: U.S. interventions in “host nations” (its writers did not contemplate the possibility of a domestic insurgency). It is possible, therefore, to characterize it as a guide to “benevolent occupation,” benevolent in the sense that occupation is perceived as a temporary device until authority can be devolved to a (friendly) government.

By focusing on peoples' wars, the manual neglects a significant subset of civil wars—those labeled “greed” or “new” wars—that is, conflicts that appear to be characterized by the fragmentation of rival actors, as well as the “economization,” criminalization, and privatization of their motives and goals. Think Sierra Leone or the Congo.Footnote ⁶ This would be a significant omission were we to treat the manual as a scholarly text, but it is less so once we recognize its goals. As John Mueller (Reference Mueller2004) has convincingly argued, the assortment of ragtag militias and armed bands that emerge in these wars do not pose much of a military problem as they can easily be defeated by a well-organized and disciplined army. The problem in those cases is a different one from what the manual's writers primarily care about: rebuilding a collapsed state rather than defeating a serious and resilient insurgency. In other words, while it is important to recognize the subset of civil wars the manual deals with, its selection bias is fully justified from a policy perspective.

What is, however, less justified is the bracketing off of politics that typifies the manual. This point is related to my second question: What kind of social and political theory informs its theory of counterinsurgency? It is possible to pinpoint two key elements. First, it is informed by a constructivist understanding of identities as malleable (or at least of individual behavior as relatively independent of identities). Second, it is characterized by a misperception of the battlegrounds of insurgency that leads to confusion between the objectives of intervention and its methods.

It is not surprising that an “on-the-ground” policy manual adopts a hard, voluntaristic stance and fails to acknowledge or theorize any structural limitations. The manual views human societies as being divided by fundamentally weak cleavages: An active minority supports the government while a passive minority opposes it. The counterinsurgent's goal is to bolster the former and neutralize the latter, while influencing the mass in the middle. Identities can be changed, or at the very least behaviors can be delinked from identities, hence, its constructivism. The manual does not seem to entertain the idea that some identities (say ethnic or religious ones) maybe so hardwired as to preclude reconstruction or reshaping; and while it does recognizes that in the age of nationalism there is little love or patience for foreign intervention or occupation,Footnote ⁷ it brushes such considerations aside. I think that this may be less of a problem than many political scientists would acknowledge, for there is considerable evidence that “ethnic defection,” the collaboration of ethnic minority members with the government rather than with ethnic minority insurgents, is much more common than generally acknowledged (Kalyvas Reference Kalyvasforthcoming). Nevertheless the variable modalities of ethnic defection ought to be studied and theorized, rather than thrown in the fuzzy basket of “cultural specificities” that can be understood only by astute observers or practioners on the ground.

The second element of the political and social theory underpinning the manual is more problematic, however. By adopting the peoples' war model, it misperceives the insurgent battlegrounds as places where the population interacts directly with either governments or insurgents (a problem, by the way, common to both the counterinsurgency and the revolutions literature of the 1960s). Sever the link with the insurgents, the thinking goes, and the population will have no choice but to turn to the government. The fallacy here is obvious: In many “traditional” societies, the population is organized along several layers of local and regional networks; its interaction with both incumbents and insurgents is mediated by local and regional elites (Kalyvas Reference Kalyvas2006; Scott Reference Scott and Schmidt1977). Goals may often be achieved (or impeded) via interactions and political deals with these elites. It is clear to me that such deals explain a large part of the “success” of the recent “surge” in Iraq, where former Sunni insurgents “switched sides” only after their traditional leaders negotiated local deals with the U.S. military; and they did so in a context characterized by the clash between Shiite and Sunni political factions.

To be sure, the manual includes a great deal about networks and traditional forms of organization, including tribes. It also keeps repeating the mantra of political primacy: Resolving most insurgencies requires a “political solution” (p. 40). However, these points remain either underdeveloped or vague: “Political solutions” is a term that usually refers to some sort of high-level arrangement at the political center. In contrast, the crucial local politics (which takes place at the local level while being influenced by developments in the political center) is downgraded into the twin residual categories of “cultural specificities” or “social structure,” and their identification and operationalization is outsourced to local commanders, who are told to “thoroughly” map them out in a way that amounts more to subtle “art” and less to method.Footnote ⁸ In doing so, the manual allows the unrealized, long-term objectives of intervention (i.e., political development) to influence its methods (i.e., its understanding of societies as entailing direct and unmediated links between national actors and the population at large).

It is often said that militaries tend to fight the previous war. It is, therefore, tempting to conclude that this quip applies to processes of learning as well. The Counterinsurgency Field Manual is in many ways a crystallization of the lessons that American commanders painfully learned in the wake of the invasion of Iraq in 2003–5. As such, it seems to have been overtaken by developments on the ground since that period.