This book was conceived in the classrooms of the Naval Postgraduate School where I teach company and field grade US and international officers. Some of them have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years not only unsettled by their experiences in those countries, but also persuaded that the hearts and minds counterinsurgency doctrines they were dispatched to apply from 2007 were idealistic, when not naïve, impracticable, unworkable, and perhaps institutionally fraudulent. In short, they had been sent on a murderous errand equipped with a counterfeit doctrine that became the rage in 2007 following the publication of FM 3–24: Counterinsurgency as prologue to the surge commanded by General David Petraeus in Iraq. This was surely the case of US Air Force Major John Loftis, a former Peace Corps volunteer, sterling student, and a gentle, smiling man who fell victim to green-on-blue violence in Afghanistan in February 2012.

In 2010, Professor Jan Hoffenaar, President of the Netherlands Commission of Military History, invited me to address their 35th Congress at Amsterdam on the theme of counterinsurgency. My argument continues to be that what has long been called small war in its various reiterations as imperial policing or COIN (counterinsurgency operations) does not constitute a specialized category of warfare. Rather, it consists of the application of petty war tactics that its advocates since the 1840s have puffed as infallible prescriptions for effortless conquest, nation-building, and national grandeur. Small wars enthusiasts basically reject the Clausewitzian character of war in favor of a Jominian tactical and operational approach, in large part to evade democratic civilian control. Claims in doctrine for success in small wars, at least at a reasonable strategic, financial, and moral cost, have relied on mythologized versions of the past too often supported by shoddy research and flawed, selective analysis of cases.