• Home
• Opinion

(CBS) 

The Pentagon Printing Press

Kilcullen, now freelancing “in the board room, the battle space, and anywhere in between” (according to his company’s website), represents one militarized segment of this overwhelmingly pro-war, or at least anti-antiwar, publishing trend.  Another party responsible for beefing up the numbers when it comes to books on the Afghan War is the military itself. 

Over the last year, the Pentagon’s own publishing arms have been printing up a storm.  Take Afghanistan Counterinsurgency and the Indirect Approach, released earlier this year by the Joint Special Operations University -- a Pentagon professional school designed to meet the “specific educational needs of special operators and non-SOF [special operations forces] national security decision makers.”  It is just one of the many monographs pouring off Pentagon presses that investigate various aspects of COIN and related concepts with an eye toward improving U.S. fortunes in Afghanistan.   In the book, Thomas Henrikson, former Army officer and now senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, conducts a historical analysis of the “indirect approach” to COIN.  (In other words, when Americans partner with, or rely on, local forces to carry out U.S. wars abroad.)  And guess what?  He thinks it’s exactly the way to go, so long as it’s done with “thoughtfulness,” and so he advocates for more of the same in the years ahead. 

Another Joint Special Operations University monograph on COIN concepts published this year, Joseph Celeski’s Hunter-Killer Teams: Attacking Enemy Safe Havens, analyzes past efforts at “hunter-killer operations” -- long-term lethal missions conducted in enemy safe havens designed to out-guerrilla enemy guerrillas.  Celeski, a retired colonel who spent 30 years in the Army and served two tours commanding special ops units in Afghanistan, offers a hunter-killer survey of history ranging from brutal American colonial efforts against Native Americans to the ruthless anti-partisan warfare of Nazi jagdkommandos during World War II.  While he’s at it, he can’t help cataloging a sordid history of soldiers making war on noncombatants in the name of counterinsurgency. 

You would think that, given the lineage of hunter-killer operations and where they always seem to lead, Celeski might suggest that they are ineffective in a COIN environment, where “hearts and minds” are key, and a sure road to war crimes and civilian suffering.  Not so.  Instead, he advocates the creation of new, specialized “hunter-killer” units within the U.S. military.  And on the ground he’s in good company, it turns out.  At this moment, according to the New York Times, Afghan War commander Petraeus is threatening (more) cross-border ground operations into Pakistan and “greatly expanding Special Operations raids (as many as a dozen commando raids a night).”

By Nick Turse
Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.