SMALL WARS JOURNAL
smallwarsjournal.com
War is about Killing and Destruction, It is Not
Armed Social Science:
A Short Response to Andrew Mackay
and Steve Tatham
Gian P. Gentile
I feel sorry for the British Army for they seem to have been taken in by the American Army’s
consumption with Counterinsurgency and its theoretical premise that military force can “change
entire societies” for the better. Of course this quote is attributed to one of America’s leading
Counterinsurgency experts retired Army Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl.
The irony is that the American Coin experts in their own campaign to transform the American
Army to a Counterinsurgency force from 2005 to 2007 used the British Army as an example of
the proper way to do “classic” Coin: e.g., Malaya, and Sir Robert Thompson’s recommendations
for the United States in Vietnam. Yet as the Iraq Triumph Narrative is now written, the British
Army lost their way and failed in Iraq where the Americans succeeded. Now, just as with the
American Army, the British Army based on this essay by Mackay and Tatham have succumbed
to the flawed theories and notions promoted by General Rupert Smith in his hugely influential
but deeply flawed book The Utility of Force. The idea that wars are fought “amongst the people”
coupled with the American view that military force can transform societies. This is militarized
social science run amok. Senior American military leaders are often quoted saying such things
with regard to Afghanistan that it is not how many we “kill” but how many we “convince.” If
you want to appreciate the futility of military force in a very short amount of time trying to do
social engineering and transform a society read Jeffrey Race’s classic account of a province in
the Vietnam War, War Comes to Long An.
So nowadays in this flawed thinking everything is war from passing out humanitarian relief in
Darfur, to NGO protection, to non-lethal effects, to establishing combat outposts in Mogadishu
to eradicate pirates, to the valleys of the Korengal, to fighting off the North Korean hordes. All
is war and everything is subsumed within it. But what is the American Army (and the British
Army) to do with this new construct of total war? What is the Army’s place in it? Should we be
optimized to fight using combined arms or to do stability operations. And please, the lovers of
the word “balance” don’t come back with the B word as magic wand for wishing away touch
choices. Tough choices must be made. Yet instead of making choices we find ourselves in a
muddle, confused about the true nature of war and of our Army’s purpose. Sadly to me, the
British Army seems to be in the same rut.
