Book Review: Bad Strategies

Military Review

BAD STRATEGIES: How Major Powers Fail in Counterinsurgency, James S. Corum, Zenith Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2008, 304 pages, $28.00.

James S. Corum's Bad Strategies is a well-written, coherent argument that adaptive, flexible military organizations are necessary but insufficient to win against insurgents. Corum argues that the key to winning against insurgents is to have the right strategy in place. He further argues that democracies tend not be particularly effective in developing effective counterinsurgency strategies and in persevering to execute the strategies, at least in the case of insurgencies.

His conclusions are both cautionary and a prescription for actions democratic governments might take to preclude developing bad strategies and avoiding defeat. Perhaps the most useful of these is to avoid insurgency where possible by effective long-term strategic thinking in the first place and by seeking political accommodation when it appears that an insurgency will develop. Corum raises more questions than he answers in his conclusion, but this book is a worthy effort that contemporary officers and policy makers should read.

Corum considers four cases in developing his thesis - France in Algeria, Britain in Cyprus, and the United States in Vietnam and Iraq. Given the current American infatuation with David Galula, Corum's chapter on France is, in some ways, the most interesting. He asserts that France, including its political elite at the time, viewed losing Algeria as emotionally intolerable because Algeria was technically part of metropolitan France. That, along with the loss of Indochina, made the potential for losing Algeria unbearable. Thus, emotion, not coldblooded strategic thinking, drove France's policy in Algeria.

French policy makers, the Algerian French, the pied noirs, the French Army, and the French Colonial Army found themselves at odds with international public opinion and their American allies in particular in the first two decades after VE Day. France's policy makers were unable to think long-term about the essential conundrum of Algeria that indigenous Algerians dominated a large European minority. Ultimately, the pied noirs, more than the Algerian insurgents, precluded a reasonable political accommodation. Corum also argues that the French Colonial Army fighting in Algeria adapted rapidly and well to the challenge confronting it. Nonetheless, the French Colonial Army failed in the end, because the strategy of maintaining the status quo ante could not hold. It took quintessential French Nationalist Charles De Gaulle to release the Algerians from their colonial bondage.

In other cases such as Cyprus, Vietnam, and Iraq, the Great Powers, like the French before them, suffered from false analogies, short-term views, flawed objectives, and a lack of perseverance that made military innovation irrelevant. In short, in the absence of carefully considered political and strategic objectives, Armies cannot win, however well they are organized. The moral for the U.S. Army, simply stated, is that neither FM 3-24 nor a brigade-based Army tailored for counterinsurgency will overcome flawed strategy.

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