I’ve kind of got too many things to do today to get into the details of this, but a couple months ago I broke the story of how Dave Kilcullen was putting together a counterinsurgency guide for cabinet-level officials, and now it’s been published by the State Department. Since I can’t figure out how to import .pdf URLs using my Mac — you’d think someone whose life revolves around the Internet would be more computer-savvy, but no –  let me link to incoming deputy assistant secretary of defense Janine Davidson’s Small Wars Journal post about the guide.

Hopefully I’ll be able to write something about the text in the next few days, but I notice that one of Abu Muqawama’s commenters is unimpressed:

 …it all looks a bit like the imaginary Disneyland version of COIN, scrubbed clean of all of its complex moral dilemmas and difficult operational trade-offs.

What is one to make, for example, about the ambiguous advice given regarding development assistance—that a principle of parity should be applied so that excluded groups don’t feel excluded, but that it shouldn’t reward bad behaviour (especially given the tendency, sometimes effectively, sometimes ineffectively, to use it as a carrot)?

Maybe I’ll take this back after I read the finished product, but given the intended audience of senior-most policymakers, that all strikes me actually rather useful. When you’re writing for cabinet secretaries, you’ll be more successful if you explain how to conceive of a problem than if you give suggestions for solving it.