Counter Insurgency (reading reference) part 3

Brendan McQuade: The Return of Domestic CounterInsurgency?: "When counterinsurgency returned as dominant policy during the War on Terror, the military was its most visible advocate. Today after the seeming success of the Iraq troop surge, the counterinsurgents are dominant in the military. Andrew Bacevich, perhaps the most prominent critic of counterinsurgency today, went so far as to argue that we are witnessing the emergence of the 'Petraeus doctrine,' where 'armed conflict will be protracted, ambiguous, and continuous… War [now] implies not only coercion but also social engineering.' The Petraeus doctrine displaces the more cautious Powell Doctrine 'with its emphasis on overwhelming force, assumed that future American wars would be brief, decisive, and infrequent.'

In 2009, Giraldi told me that the CIA's Special Operations Group was again growing: 'Now they are much bigger they have a lot of contractors. They have a lot of ex-Special Forces people working for them but they are still kind of an adjunct. I'd be hard pressed to come up with a senior officer in SOG.' With David Petraeus, the man who made counterinsurgency dominant in the US military, at the helm of the CIA, we can expect SOG to continue to grow and become more central."