SMALL WARS JOURNAL
smallwarsjournal.com
Overdue Bill: Integrating Counterinsurgency into
Army Professional Education
Niel Smith
In the eight years since the invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. Army has failed to integrate
counterinsurgency (COIN)
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into Professional Military Education (PME). Counterinsurgency
instruction remains uneven in quantity and quality throughout Army Training and Doctrine
Command (TRADOC) institutions, which have failed to define standards, competencies and
outcomes for COIN education. This lack of consistency contributes to ongoing operational
confusion and poor execution of operations in both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation
Enduring Freedom due to lack of common concept of what counterinsurgency is and what it
entails, despite great advances in COIN application and execution by troops in the field.
Integrating COIN into PME is crucial for improving the ability of the Army to wage our current
wars. Ideally, two officers or NCO’s educated at differing TRADOC schoolhouses should
emerge with similar skills and knowledge competencies on doctrine and staff processes. This
synchronization is crucial to allowing large staffs with multiple specialties to operate seamlessly
using shared understandings of the operational environment. No such standardization exists for
the topic of COIN, despite adequate published doctrine and historical military literature.
TRADOC must address this shortcoming in one of its key areas of responsibility. This paper
will outline several actions executable within the TRADOC commander’s existing authority to
address these problems.
Professional military education reinforces the doctrinal foundations of the operational force and
on the ground experience. Despite eight years of operational experience, TRADOC still lacks a
comprehensive educational approach to COIN to normalize the instruction provided in its
schools and centers. This is remarkable in the shadow of the massive transformation of
operational force pre-deployment training to reflect the realities of the current environment.
Hard won operational experience demands a complimentary educational foundation so Soldiers
The author would like to thank the numerous individuals from the Combined Arms Center, Small Wars Council, and
Warlord Loop who critiqued and strengthened this paper from its genesis over two years ago. The opinions contained
are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the U.S. Army or Department of Defense.
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This paper will focus on the instruction of counterinsurgency (COIN) in a holistic sense, with the realization that
COIN by definition is intertwined with topics and terms such as irregular warfare, stability operations, hybrid war, low
intensity conflict, security force assistance, internal defense and development, and foreign internal defense, to name but a
few. The solutions proposed apply in various degrees to the Army’s current implementation of these other subjects. To
maintain consistency and clarity throughout the paper, COIN will be used in its broadest context.
