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.”
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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