Follow this link to the article in The Christian Science Monitor.

The Huffington post in pointing to this article falsely headlined it as McChrystal Criticism Mounts Within Obama Administration.

It has occurred to me that McChrystal is not going around the chain of command by speaking directly to the people and to congress.  He may very well be following the orders of the chain of command to do just what he is doing.

McChrystal may be making the case for the policy that Obama wants to follow, but which does not have much public support yet.  By the time McChrystal is finished, the public may be begging Obama to please do what Obama has wanted to do all along.

Also, there is no single military strategy that fits all situations.  COIN should be the strategy of choice for situations like the end game in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Even in these two wars, the initial part of the game was to overcome fairly conventional forces.  A somewhat conventional US military strategy succeeded during the first phase.  The problem was that for many years there was no switch over to the strategy needed for the second phase.

Any faction in our military that thinks we should focus on one strategy to the neglect of all others is being far too doctrinaire for the real world.  Same for the public and the politicians.

In the article the analysis by Col. Gian Gentile, head of the military history program at the US Military Academy at West Point that Israel had been trying a counterinsurgency operation in the Palestinian territories is just insane.

He thinks the same thing happened to the Israelis in their disastrous war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006: their skills at “combined arms” – blending infantry, tanks, and artillery – had eroded because they had spent so much time carrying out counterinsurgency operations in the Palestinian territories.

I have written comment 1, comment2, and comment 3 on Huffington Post.