After Hard-Won Lessons, Army Doctrine Revised

By MICHAEL R. GORDON
February 8, 2008
New York Times

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A couple of years ago we started to attend meetings in which the military appeared to be talking seriously about efforts to enhance its ability to move beyond "kinetic" operations and start to work with civilian and nongovernment agencies to pursue something much closer to what we would call peacebuilding. This is, perhaps most famously referred to in Directive 3000.05 and NSPD-44. A lot of people were skeptical. This article, however, suggests that this trend is real and is continuing.

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The Army has drafted a new operations manual that elevates the mission of stabilizing war-torn nations, making it equal in importance to defeating adversaries on the battlefield.

Military officials described the new document, the first new edition of the Army’s comprehensive doctrine since 2001, as a major development that draws on the hard-learned lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, where initial military successes gave way to long, grueling struggles to establish control.

It is also an illustration of how far the Pentagon has moved beyond the Bush administration’s initial reluctance to use the military to support “nation-building” efforts when it came into office.

The rest of the article is available from the New York Times.