In this February’s Harper’s, Edward N. Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies heartily condemns the newly published Counterinsurgency Manual. Luttwak doesn’t seem exactly to disagree with the premise that more political/social approaches are preferable to the current absence of political strategy, he just thinks that 1) this is not an original idea and 2) it failed before (i.e. Vietnam). In fact, there was a reason why the military abandoned counterinsurgency training: they didn’t want to fight these kinds of wars because Vietnam taught they were not winnable. Or, Luttwak points out, only winnable with the application of collective punishment against the entire population to prevent their support of insurgents. Which hopefully will not be come our official strategy.

Most interesting from a “vital systems” perspective, Luttwak questions the proposition that “a necessary if not sufficient condition of victory is to provide what the insurgents cannot: basic public services, physical reconstruction, the hope of economic development and social amelioration. The hidden assumption is that there is only one kind of politics in the world, a politics in which popular support is important or even decisive, and that such support can be won by providing better government.”