Counterinsurgency Fighting: Taking the Scalpel to the Terrorists

Fire of Liberty

While combing through various websites yesterday, I came across this interesting article by Kris Hundley in the St. Petersburg Times that notes how the Pentagon, various War College professors and officers increasing demand for highly praised out of print books on fighting counterinsurgencies in place like. Though they could probably find a certain amount of these books from ABE Books, Amazon or other used book stores in US, these officers and war planners have turned their sites to Jamie Hailer who owns a boutique publishing house called Hailer Publishing that finds and reprints various out of print books on military history and strategy. In fact, Hailer discovered a growing interest in his publishing house when various professor of West Point, the Naval War College and the upper echelons of the Pentagon purchased some 2,400 copies of Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, which is the masterwork of David Galula, an officer in the French military who had extensive knowledge of how to fight a counterinsurgency through his service in China, Southeast Asia and Algeria. It's awesome to have someone like Hailer providing these rare classics that provide such a thought provoking and excellent user guide for our various officers and soldiers fighting counterinsurgents throughout the world. You know you're a hit when you read about the buzz generated in the defense and intelligence community, just take a look:

"I kind of stumbled on a subculture of retired CIA and Army guys who are pulling their hair out about us blowing it in Iraq like we did in Vietnam," said Hailer (pronounced Hi-ler). "When they found out I was publishing this book, they pushed it like crazy."

Rick Newton, an instructor at the Joint Special Operations University at Hurlburt Field in Florida's Panhandle ordered 100, then e-mailed his buddies at West Point and the Naval War College; they also wanted the book.

Newton, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, said he had been looking for the Galula book for a couple of years before being put in touch with Hailer.

"It's the only book I'd found which takes strategic-level goals and links them to what soldiers on the ground have to do," Newton said of the book, written in 1964 while Galula was on a fellowship at Harvard. "You read it and scratch your head and say, "He got it right."'

Next thing Hailer knew, the head of the Command & General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, where the Army trains its top brass, ordered 1,500 copies, saying he wanted to put the book in the hands of every student.

I guess everybody makes their own kind of contribution to the war effort or in Hailer's case, an enhancement to the training of our war planners and soldiers in their effort to destroy the forces of evil that threaten to snuff out the flames of freedom and replace it with death and tyranny. Along with Galula's wonderful book, I'd supplement it with Lewis Sorley's A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam , Max Boot's The Savage Wars of Peace, The Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual, US Army Chief of Staff General Peter J. Schoomaker's Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessions from Malaya and Vietnam as well as Robert D. Kaplan's Imperial Grunts. If our soldiers peruse these titles (If I know them, they've probably already read them by now) then we should cruise along just great in our fight against terrorism.