ABSTRACT
If, as The US Army/Marine Corps Field Manual, Counterinsurgency (FM 3-24) states, counterinsurgency is “the graduate level of war,” then advisors to indigenous forces are professors of counterinsurgency. Foreign forces cannot defeat an insurgency; the best they can hope for is to create the conditions and provide the enablers to allow local forces to win-for in the end it is the local forces that have to re-establish security, authority, and legitimacy, and to maintain these conditions. After describing the many complicated, interrelated, and simultaneous tasks that must be conducted to defeat an insurgency, FM 3-24 notes, “Key to all these tasks is developing an effective host nation security force.”2
