Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 106

policing, information operations, governance, and nearly
every other aspect of counterinsurgency and security
force assistance in a host nation.
In Jeffrey Bordin’s 2011 survey of Afghan and
American forces within their respective advisor and
operator roles, he found that more than half of Afghan
soldiers surveyed complained that coalition forces “exhibit[ed] extreme arrogance and refuse[d] to take advice”
and “yell[ed] at … [or demonstrated] a lack of respect to
Afghan National Security Forces.”35 On the other hand, the
surveyed coalition soldiers in advisory or partnered roles
responded overwhelmingly that the Afghans were “incompetent,” were “lazy and refuse[d] to work very hard,” could
“not be trusted,” and were “traitors” or “unstable,” with “poor
Afghan leadership” who were “useless.”36 The coalition and
Afghan negative perspectives correlated closely with the
traditional master-student teaching model.
Emancipating U.S. military teachers from the old
master model would require significant direction, creativity, and radical change at the highest levels of military
leadership; nothing short of a focused and systemic
effort would break our military free of the grip of explication in how it views the professionalization of U.S. and
foreign military forces.

Even if we could shift our overall counterinsurgency
approach away from the old master model toward the
intellectually emancipated ignorant counterinsurgent
approach, we would need to inspire a similar breakthrough in our counterparts.37 The host-nation security
force, likely tied to a similar mindset, would need the
same kind of liberation in changing their framing of the
relationship between the coalition soldier and the local
counterinsurgent. Members of the host-nation forces are
not unequal to the coalition’s members, and the coalition’s members are not the masters of the professional
knowledge. The local counterinsurgents can learn on
their own initiative, in novel directions, and develop
their forces into an end state that is even unknown to the
coalition professional.38
Both forces could operate in an ignorant counterinsurgent manner and develop a viable, durable counterinsurgency security force that would match the unique
needs of that fledgling society. The result should come in a
different and unusual form that is foreign to the military
professional. Yet, we should not fear our ignorance of
this. Instead, we need to embrace uncertainty as a useful
perspective to better understand how we perceive counterinsurgency, and why this is.

Maj. Ben Zweibelson is an infantry officer with more than two decades of combined service and a veteran of the
Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. A graduate of the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies, he is currently
an exercise planner with Mission Command Training Program, Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Notes
Epigraph. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five
Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 9.
Epigraph. Field Manual (FM) 3-24, Counterinsurgency (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office [GPO], December
2006), 6-17 (now obsolete). After this article was written, a new FM
3-24, Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies, was published (May
2014). The principles of rapport building remain in Army doctrine.
1. Shirley-Ann Hazlett, Rodney McAdam, and Seamus Gallagher,
“Theory-Building in Knowledge Management: In Search of Paradigms,” Journal of Management Inquiry 14, no. 1 (March 2005): 32.
2. Philip Georg Friedrich Von Reck, Von Reck’s Voyage: Drawings and Journal of Philip Georg Friedrich von Reck, ed. Kristian
Hvidt Von Reck (Savannah, GA: The Beehive Press, 1980), cited in

104

“National Humanities Center, Toolbox Library” (website) “Becoming American: The British Atlantic Colonies, 1690-1763,” http://
nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/becomingamer/peoples/text3/
indianscolonists.pdf (accessed 15 January 2015).
3. Hazlett, McAdam, and Gallagher, 32. The authors offer a telling explanation of epistemology and critical thinking.
4. Karl Weick, “Drop Your Tools: an Allegory for Organizational Studies,” Administrative Science Quarterly 41 (1996): 308.
The author states, “People have multiple, interdependent, socially
coherent reasons for doing what they do.”
5. FM 3-24. See also FM 3-07.1, Security Force Assistance
(Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, May 2009) [now obsolete]; and Joint
Publication ( JP) 3-22, Foreign Internal Defense (Washington, DC:
U.S. GPO, 12 July 2010) on counterinsurgency general objectives
and strategic goals. Although retired in 2013, FM 3-07.1 provides
necessary historical context for the doctrine used in the formative

March-April 2015  MILITARY REVIEW