Why the Army’s Messaging About COIN Is Dangerous

Small Wars Journal | Michael Carvelli

The United States Army transitioned its primary training emphasis to large-scale combat operations after 2015 to prepare for potential high-intensity conflict against peer adversaries Russia and China. Institutional messaging framing this shift as a complete pivot away from counterinsurgency creates critical vulnerabilities across future operational spectrums. Two decades of counterinsurgency focus in Iraq and Afghanistan previously degraded conventional maneuvering capabilities, prompting necessary structural recalibrations.

Conflating large-scale combat operations as the supreme training standard with counterinsurgency being obsolete degrades long-term force readiness and decays institutional knowledge. Curriculum updates at Army University and the Command and General Staff College risk producing future command elements unable to execute population security or governance support. Historical evidence from Iraq in 2003 demonstrates that conventional battlefield success can rapidly deteriorate into persistent irregular warfare. Senior military leadership must reframe institutional guidance to preserve counterinsurgency doctrine alongside large-scale combat preparedness.

Comment

The institutional elevation of Field Manual 3-0 Operations shifts command focus toward division and corps-level joint fires synchronization, fundamental to peer attrition warfare. This structural reorientation alters how staff bandwidth and training cycles are allocated during major force-on-force exercises at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin. By framing operational readiness predominantly around corps-level maneuvering, lower-echelon leaders lose tactical exposure to the decentralized authority framework codified in Field Manual 3-24 Counterinsurgency.

This institutional focus creates friction during campaign transition phases, where corps-directed deep fires integration becomes secondary to small-unit population security and civil-military operations. When brigade combat teams train exclusively for peer-level division maneuvers, company-grade officers lose the operational habits necessary to execute decentralized stability tasks under Field Manual 3-24 guidance.

Strategic Question for Discussion

Which factor introduces greater operational risk during campaign transitions — the atrophy of company-level decentralized decision-making under Field Manual 3-24, or staff friction when reorienting corps headquarters from joint fires to civil-military governance?

The pattern of post-conventional force transitions suggests that staff friction at corps level presents the immediate bottleneck, as headquarters struggle to reallocate intelligence and targeting assets. However, the longer-term vulnerability lies in the erosion of company-grade initiative under Field Manual 3-24, which cannot be quickly reconstituted during active stability operations. This trajectory indicates that while higher headquarters eventually adapt their planning cycles, tactical echelons remain ill-equipped for decentralized counterinsurgency execution.

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