ABSTRACT
Population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) is a military operation, a method, nothing more and nothing less. Andrew Krepinevich's strategy of tactics argument for Vietnam was that the American Army was so conventionally minded and hidebound that it was unable to see a better way of population-centric COIN. This combined Malaya, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan War narrative has turned the American Army's new counterinsurgency doctrine outlined in FM 3–24 into an oracle. But there are points of criticism to the new doctrine that need to be seriously considered. Counterinsurgency experts in the American defense establishment have gone to great lengths to turn their new way of war into something revolutionary, something radically different from the past, something more complex and qualitatively more difficult than what came before. Instead of American Army officers reading the so-called COIN classic texts of Galula, Thompson, Kitson, and Nagl, they should be reading the history of the British Empire in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
