A new article from the Small Wars Journal applies Jominian analysis to a critique of modern US counterinsurgency doctrine. The brief review of Jomini, by way of Maguire, will evoke many Civil War campaigns in the mind of the reader.Interesting general note on theory vs practice from the piece:
What the US Army and Marine Corps seem to have done in their counterinsurgent doctrine is to turn despair of finding enemy’s lines of communication into a doctrinal escape from the [Jominian] principles that focus on those lines. The new doctrine displays a sort of psychological displacement behavior in the face of failure. For instance, because the lines are hard to find, descriptions of the type of combat begin to include the expression ‘non-linear.’ Once accepted that a war is non-linear by nature, any need to look for the lines collapses, and any principles constructed on the basis of their existence are rendered inapplicable.By the way, the DEA (unlike the Army) views clandestine networks differently and attacks them through their lines of communication and support (as this article shows, starting on page 21).
Jomini and the Civil War remain with us.
