Wrong Turn: America's Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency (2013) by Colonel Gian Gentile looks at how the US has embraced a doctrine of successful counterinsurgency and why it doesn't work. Gentile is a history professor at Westpoint and he did two deployments to Iraq during the Second Iraq War.
This took courage to write, given the author’s position and the overwhelming view of the military from 2006-2021. Therefore, any well researched and balanced criticism of the COIN hegemony is/was desperately needed.
Some of the arguments he uses, especially comparing the before/after in Malaya, seem ...more
Having recently read Galula, "The Insurgents", "The Way of the Knife", "Ghost Soldiers" "The Outpost", "Invisible Armies" and "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife" I was heavily pre-disposed to be entirely unsympathetic to Gentile's thesis re the inadequacies of COIN. What could be better, though, tha ...more
Short, provocative, and worthwhile. Colonel Gentil tries to deconstruct the COIN narrative so prevalent in American military circles these days. His strength comes in the historical analysis of the British in Malaya and the differences between their success their and the application of those princip ...more
Gian Gentile has long been one of the most outspoken critics of the cult-like obsession with population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) that swept the US Army from 2006-2009 on the coat tails of General David Petraeus' self-promotion campaign. Gentile recognized the charlatans before most of us, an ...more
This book is a valuable contribution to the conversation regarding counterinsurgency and its place in the military's toolbag of tricks. However, reading this, I often felt like the author was sacrificing his prose to his polemic. Additionally, the two theses (a. COIN is wrong and misguided and b. sa ...more
Clear and succinct argument on why America's current revolutionary COIN strategy is nothing new, and, if not checked, encourages perpetual warfare/nation building.
Addresses all supporting evidence from FM3-24, and provides another perspective that reflects the progress of the wars today. ...more
Absolutely a very clear analysis of what works and what doesn't work in counter-insurgency war, especially addressing the British experiences in Malaya and the US experiences in Vietnam and Afghanistan. ...more