SMALL WARS JOURNAL
smallwarsjournal.com
Counterinsurgency and Professional Military
Education
Mark Moyar
Major Niel Smith’s article “Integrating COIN into Army Professional Education” contains
valuable insights and has provoked a large amount of fruitful dialogue on the Small Wars
Journal website. What follows here is intended to add some thoughts to the discussion, to point
out some challenges involved in achieving change, and to offer suggestions for overcoming those
challenges. Although I am a professor at the Marine Corps University, these views are strictly
my own, not those of the Marine Corps University.
When I was a course director at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, I was
responsible for adding large amounts of COIN instruction to the core curriculum from 2005 to
2007. Most of what I know, therefore, is based on Marine education, which is different in
important ways from Army education. The much smaller size of the former allows it to change
more quickly, and Marine culture puts less emphasis on doctrine than Army culture.
Nevertheless, I think that much of what has been learned from teaching COIN at Marine Corps
PME schools is applicable to the Army.
The educational outcomes specified on page 3 of Smith’s article, derived from a 2007 conference
at Ft. Leavenworth, are very useful. PME schools are accustomed to developing course content
based on such a set of outcomes. This list attaches much weight to doctrine, and particularly to
FM 3-24. Although I think FM 3-24 is a pretty good document, I have some serious reservations
about it, and some of the commentaries on Smith’s article also reflect concern about FM 3-24,
for instance the validity of the “hearts-and-minds” theory that undergirds much of the manual. If
you asked 100 COIN experts what they thought of FM 3-24 and what they thought should be
taught about COIN in PME, you would get 100 different opinions. Given the lack of consensus,
it becomes very difficult to get very specific on what we should teach on COIN.
Centralizing and standardizing COIN instruction also runs the risk of encouraging the inside-the-
box thinking and risk-aversion that we have been trying to eliminate in recent years. If we spell
out in great detail how COIN should be taught, many will be more inclined to take a checklist
approach to training and education, and our officers will be more likely to employ a checklist
approach in Afghanistan.
Another impediment to standardization of COIN training and education is the resistance that
PME schools will inevitably mount. This resistance will be understandable, and perhaps even
justified. These schools are constantly receiving bright ideas from outsiders about what they
should teach, and they usually believe that those outsiders aren’t qualified to make impositions
