Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 105

IGNORANT COUNTERINSURGENT

Emancipatory teaching process
Breaking the hierarchical control of knowledge
Critical inquiry
and self-awareness
of why a system is
transforming

Ignorant counterinsurgent approach to professionalizing militaries

Q1 Q2
Q3 Q4

Learned

Old master approach to professionalizing militaries

Unlearned

Myth production—
imitation without proficiency; mimicry without capabilities

Maintaining the hierarchical control of knowledge
Explication teaching process

Figure. Explaining Multiple Teacher-Student Paradigms
knowledge that the students are learning. However,
with the emancipatory approach the teacher does not
apply the old master elements of distance and inequality. Instead, in quadrant 1, the teacher encourages exploration and even critical introspection of the knowledge, where the students can question and even violate
the discipline in the emergent process of discovering
novel solutions.
In quadrants 1 and 2, the students actually teach the
teacher, whereas in quadrant 3, the old master merely
humors that sentiment while evaluating their progress.
When ignorant teachers use the stultifying traditional approach, they tend to teach and enforce faulty
knowledge to students, who subsequently imitate and repeat the process. This can generate a powerful, self-perpetuating discipline comprised of myths and falsehoods.
Quadrant 4 (Q4) represents the perpetration of myths
that create friction, inefficiencies, and contradictions
in an organization, and at times become entrenched in
ritualization, indoctrination, or cultural association.
MILITARY REVIEW  March-April 2015

Therefore, preparing a counterinsurgency strategy
requires critical reflection, to go beyond the methodological arguments and to consider—from an epistemological
perspective—what will be learned, how to teach it, and
what approaches will be valid versus invalid.

Conclusions: Ignorant Teachers
and Ignorant Students of
Counterinsurgency
Could military advisors teach what they do not know?
Could U.S. logistics advisors teach Afghans about things
the advisors do not know? Could the Afghans teach the
Americans about how logistics might function with a
nonautomated, non-text-based, and culturally appropriate way that would be, perhaps, entirely foreign to
the American logistics discipline? Could the American
and the Afghan logisticians explore a novel, previously
undiscovered logistics approach, one that both could learn
about and develop together? Although the example here
is logistics, the principle easily transforms to intelligence,
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