- published: 16 Apr 2015
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A counter-insurgency or counterinsurgency (COIN) involves actions taken by the recognized government of a nation to contain or quell an insurgency taken up against it. In the main, the insurgents seek to destroy or erase the political authority of the defending authorities in a population they seek to control, and the counter-insurgent forces seek to protect that authority and reduce or eliminate the supplanting authority of the insurgents.
Counter-insurgency operations are common during war, occupation and armed rebellions. Counter-insurgency may be armed suppression of a rebellion, coupled with tactics such as divide and rule designed to fracture the links between the insurgency and the population in which the insurgents move. Because it may be difficult or impossible to distinguish between an insurgent, a supporter of an insurgency who is a non-combatant, and entirely uninvolved members of the population, counter-insurgency operations have often rested on a confused, relativistic, or otherwise situational distinction between insurgents and non-combatants.
Colonel Gian P. Gentile is a US army officer and a history professor at the United States Military Academy.
Gentile is a prominent critic of the US military's approach to counterinsurgency. He believes that the surge was not the primary cause of the post-2006 reduction in violence in Iraq, and effective counterinsurgency tactics were practiced by American troops in Iraq from 2003 on, rather than being introduced in 2006-7. He further argues that the US military is now concentrating excessively on counterinsurgency, to the detriment of its capacity to fight conventional wars. Following Andrew Bacevich, he believes that the prominence of counterinsurgency has led to an unrealistic view of the American military's power and capacity to change the world.
Gentile graduated from UC-Berkeley, where he joined the ROTC, in 1986. In 2000, he completed a PhD in history at Stanford University. He served two tours in Iraq, first as the executive officer of a combat brigade in Tikrit in 2003 and then as the commander of the RSTA Squadron, 8-10 Cavalry, in a restive area of southwest Baghdad in 2006.