Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 99

IGNORANT COUNTERINSURGENT

(Photo by Spc. Zachary Burke, AFN BENELUX)

Lt. Col. Darrin C. Ricketts, deputy commander of 4th Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, along with Lt. Col. Donn H. Hill,
commander of Task Force White Currahee, 2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, 4th BCT, 101st Abn. Div., and U.S. Army Brig. Gen.
John Uberti, deputy commanding general of Afghan Development, 101st Abn. Div., speaks with an Afghan National Army commander for
Naka District, Afghanistan, during Operation Overlord, 14 April 2011.

violence for societal, economic, and political ends is
hardly comparable to teaching French to a class of
Flemish students, teaching counterinsurgency (through
security force assistance) from the Western perspective
currently revolves around the classical teacher-student
relationship. We see ourselves as the teachers, and
when we go to any country in the world that we believe
requires counterinsurgency assistance, we teach their
forces how we believe they should conduct security,
military, and paramilitary operations to meet our foreign policy goals.8 This foundational concept of pedagogy is so ingrained into our profession that it takes some
effort to even recognize it and reflect on it. This makes
an epistemological discussion of counterinsurgency
rather awkward. We tend to think about concrete
teaching and counterinsurgency methods instead of the
bigger picture—the values we hold as a group, especially those related to how we conceive of teaching.9
Rancière argues that nearly all Western approaches
to conveying or discovering knowledge are shackled to a strict and unequal partnership between the
teacher and the student, which he terms the old ma ster
MILITARY REVIEW  March-April 2015

relationship.10 In this model, knowledge is administered
hierarchically. The master does more than simply giving
the information (such as a book) to the students and
telling them to learn it. The master attempts to control
the learning process, by measuring progress, evaluating
students, explaining information at times, and withholding information at other times if the students are
not ready for a given level of advancement. Jacotot
called this explication, which reduces the independence
of students by forcing them into complete dependence
upon the master.11
The military education system extensively employs this very way of teaching from cadet training
and university through a military career up to the
senior levels of war colleges. No surprise, it also is how
U.S. forces seek to transfer knowledge when advising
host-nation forces, in a manner that presumes a relationship of nonequals.12
One practical consequence of this old master
relationship, in terms of pedagogy, is that it erects and
maintains a distance between teachers and the students, “a distance discursively invented and reinvented
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