Who succeeds in COIN work? It ain't always them sophisticated smoothies

There's a line in David Kilcullen's
"28 Articles" about
how you'd be surprised which soldiers are able to do counterinsurgency or
similar work, and, he adds, it has nothing to do with rank or even with
education. I thought of that when I read this observation by Maj.
Jason Ross, an Army intelligence officer, about his time in 2006 as a
member of an officer-heavy advisory team with the Iraqi army in Baghdad:

We had a lot of intelligent folks
on our team like pilots and people with advanced degrees but we had a staff
sergeant from the backwoods of Kentucky who was probably the most successful
member of the team. He somehow related to the Iraqi soldiers and latched on to
one or two of their non-commissioned officers and he got the most done.