With the shift to a new presidential administration, there's likely to be an intensification in the ongoing fight over the focus of the post-Iraq Army. Do we shift to a concentration on counterinsurgency? Have we shifted too far already? Should we revert back to a traditional force-on-force model?

At the Asia Times, Mark Perry gets into it:

Come January, the new Obama defense team will find itself in the midst of an escalating conflict between counter-insurgency advocates who feel besieged by the traditional proponents of the "Air-Land Battle doctrine" and those who live in the world of counter-insurgency operations.

The debate has recently devolved into name-calling. The counter-insurgency clique, its opponents claim, live in a "matrix" of true believers, a term derived from the movie by the same name. To escape "the matrix" you have to "swallow the blue pill", and return to the real world, where the job of the military is to destabilize nations and kill they enemy. The most important voice to speak out against the new focus on COIN, Colonel Sean MacFarland, was once in the matrix, but has now swallowed the "blue pill". MacFarland, a hero to many in the military because of his courageous work with the insurgency in Ramadi in 2006, wrote an internal army study in May that warned that the focus on counter-insurgency doctrine is weakening the Army's training regimen. A similar focus on counter-insurgency operations in the Israeli Defense Forces, MacFarland said, led to Israel's loss in their war against Hezbollah in 2006. The MacFarland heresy stunned the counter-insurgency community. "Counter-insurgency without MacFarland is like Christianity without St Paul," a senior defense official notes.

The predicament is so serious because, in many ways, this is a zero-sum game. However, the bottom line is this: In the 21st Century, a cutting edge Army has to be able to do both.

When I was "fighting" the insurgency as an infantry officer in Iraq, it involved drinking a lot of chai. I spent one afternoon arranging local transportation to get university students from Avgani to Mosul so they could take their finals.  Another day I spent troubleshooting a rural pump station. And one night, on the way down to the Tal Afar airfield, I shot some bad dudes who tried to kill me.

That's the unpredictable counterinsurgency lifestyle to which many of us have grown accustomed. And I don't think anyone doubts that it's going consume the bulk of the Army's missions for the next several decades. So preparing for it is certainly necessary.  But therein lies the problem. 

As my unit became more proficient at operating this way in Iraq, we lost much of our talent for counterattacking against the Persian or Korean hordes who could've come crashing over the border.  It just wasn't a focus. But, as MacFarland has noted, that doesn't make force-on-force know-how any less important. The primary role of the military is to defend the United States -- and an unbalanced shift toward counterinsurgency will jeopardize our ability to do that.  So here's an idea:

There's just no way around the fact that our light fighters will need to be proficient at both shooting, moving, and communicating, and counterinsurgency techniques.  But with a high op-tempo, training time between deployments must be prioritized.  To get the most out of it, we should consider focusing our unit training primarily on force-on-force methods -- as MacFarland now suggests.  At the same time, the Army should establish a counterinsurgency course for individual Soldiers.

This course should be treated within the ranks much like Ranger School.  All infantry leaders should be encouraged (or required) to attend, and a new "prestigious" Counterinsurgent Tab should be awarded to all graduates.  It could work something like this: The course would be around 10 weeks long, five days a week.  Four hours would be spent each morning in language training -- either Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Dari, or Urdu.  That might not sound like a lot, but in terms of contact hours, it's equal to about four or five college semesters in a single language.  Afternoons would consist of instruction in the tenets of counterinsurgency, to include area-specific cultural and civil affairs training. 

Like Ranger-qualified personnel, these graduates would be sprinkled throughout the infantry.  This would free up units to focus on more traditional, force-on-force training on a day-to-day basis, while counterinsurgency skills would essentially become ingrained.

In today's fight, troops must not only be adept at fighting skills -- which take years hone -- but they must know and understand the cerebral side of the battlefield.  And that includes cultural training, language training, and a flexible mindset -- something that also takes years to perfect.  Unfortunately -- with the advent of Fourth Generation Warfare -- nature has created a better mousetrap.  It's now up to the Army to create a better mouse -- as difficult as that looks to be.  A course like the one described above would be a good start.