Best Defense
Thomas E. Ricks' daily take on national security.

Ucko’s epitaph on the COIN debate

Dunno why it took me so long, but I just came across David Ucko’s article “Critics gone wild: Counterinsurgency as the root of all evil.”

By , a former contributing editor to Foreign Policy.
Screen Shot 2015-05-20 at 10.54.43 AM
Screen Shot 2015-05-20 at 10.54.43 AM

 

 

Dunno why it took me so long, but I just came across David Ucko’s article “Critics gone wild: Counterinsurgency as the root of all evil.”

I read it on a train from Genoa to Milan the other day, and would have liked it even if it didn’t give me a nice shoutout. Good line: “Gentile is effectively lauding Casey as pushing for counterinsurgency strategy on the same page upon which he dismisses counterinsurgency as irrelevant.”

Or, as I once put it to a friend: Gentile says counterinsurgency is all BS, and anyway, we were doing it before Petraeus came along.

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Thomas E. Ricks is a former contributing editor to Foreign Policy. Twitter: @tomricks1

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