Intended to protect local villages, US outposts often attracted conflict, drawing insurgent fire into civilian areas. This counterproductive dynamic, observed by journalist Wesley Morgan, turned these bases into dangerous liabilities that alienated the very population they were meant to secure, undermining a core tenet of counterinsurgency.
Military units often used 'red-amber-green' charts that inevitably showed progress during their deployment, regardless of the reality on the ground. This created a cycle of self-reported success that masked the fact that security gains were temporary and territory reverted to enemy control as soon as troops left.
In 2004, an aggressive Green Beret team was manipulated by local allies into attacking rivals in the Korengal Valley. They mistakenly believed they were fighting the enemy, but were actually intervening in a commercial timber struggle, escalating a local conflict into a years-long insurgency against US forces.
The US effort was fragmented among three groups: conventional forces, partnered Special Operations (CJSOTF), and direct-action kill/capture teams (JSOC). These 'tribes' often pursued incompatible goals, with JSOC night raids sometimes undermining the relationship-building efforts of infantry commanders in the same area, hindering the overall mission.
Struggling to quantify success in a counterinsurgency, military commanders defaulted to tracking easily measurable but irrelevant inputs. One battalion commander cited metrics like '10,000 Beanie Babies handed out' and 'number of JDAMs delivered,' highlighting a deep confusion between activity and effectiveness.
Military analyst Andrew Exum predicted that the war in Ukraine would become 'the best excuse the US army ever found to never say the words Iraq and Afghanistan again.' The institution is rapidly pivoting to large-scale combat operations, dismantling specialized units like the Asymmetric Warfare Group and discarding hard-won counterinsurgency knowledge.
Twenty years of focusing on counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan caused the Army's core competencies for conventional warfare to degrade significantly. For example, short-range air defense (SHORAD) capabilities were so gutted that the Army had to rebuild the entire skill set from scratch, as there were no experienced NCOs left to train new soldiers.
After the US Army rejected MultiCam, the pattern was secretly adopted by elite units like Delta Force. To build an 'elite' mystique without revealing its users, the creators cleverly placed it in video games like 'Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon'. This made it iconic to a generation of future soldiers before it was ever widely seen in photographs.
To avoid casualties, the U.S. military became increasingly reliant on heavy, road-bound vehicles and heavily fortified bases. This made forces less flexible and unable to access areas that earlier, more nimble units reached with pickup trucks and ATVs. The focus on protection ultimately overextended forces and ceded initiative to the enemy.
While often viewed as controlling and secretive, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was a key architect and defender of the media embed program in the early Iraq War. He reportedly overruled concerns from officials like Colin Powell, insisting on transparency and allowing reporters unprecedented access to combat patrols.
Today's conflicts in places like Ukraine and Gaza are marked by highly restrictive government access and risk-averse newsrooms. This has forced a change in reporting tactics, moving away from traditional embedding towards analyzing a flood of battlefield videos from soldiers and civilians to verify events remotely.
A surprising number of senior non-Army leaders, such as INDOPACOM commander Adm. Samuel Paparo, have counterinsurgency experience from leading Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan. The Navy and Air Force sent their best officers to these ground-based roles, creating a cohort of senior leaders with unique, cross-domain expertise.