If Galula and the Algerian War have enjoyed an improbable early twenty-first-century resurrection, it is because this tragic episode serves as the preamble for the true unfinished business that inspires the counterinsurgency revivalists: the US defeat in Vietnam. Galula’s “we won on my front” arguments underpin COIN-dinista assertions that victory is sabotaged by silent anti-COIN conspiracies struck among unimaginative conventional soldiers wedded to their big war bureaucratic interests, cowardly politicians, and a general public whose stamina for the sacrifices required for national greatness has gone soft under the influence of democratic institutions that corrode popular will.

The American military is allergic to COIN, or so conventional wisdom dictates. This theme, established in the immediate post-Vietnam era as a mechanism to assign US commander in Vietnam from 1964–1968 William Westmoreland and his coterie of conventionally minded officers blame for defeat in Southeast Asia, was taken up by organizational learning specialists in the 1990s. Led by Richard Duncan Downie, organizational learners argue that US security assistance continues to repeat the mistakes of Vietnam, in that it aims to bequeath a conventional military structure and a big war fighting style to third nation militaries that they cannot possibly afford, and that is entirely unsuited to their mission set. No surprise, then, that in Iraq a conventionally minded US military had to be bailed out by a new generation of small wars officers who revived COIN doctrine in 2006 and “surged” just in the nick of time the following year to save the US military from defeat.