Counterinsurgency: Idea vs. Implementation by Jason Fritz, War on the Rocks.
… I was a serving army officer when the counterinsurgency field manual FM-324 was published. It was, for many officers, a watershed document – even though it should not have been. It claimed to provide a different and more complex vision of conflict than the worldviews put forth by the more conventional publications that had the Cold War as their context. What FM 3-24 provided the U.S. Army was the perspective that there were more than two adversaries in a given war. This may seem silly to us now, but for many combat arms units it was nothing short of revolutionary.
Of course we know now that all wars include people other than the primary antagonists. All wars are complex. All wars have a considerable political and social element. The actions of corporals matter in every fight. The fact that these sorts of ideas were only “found” in the new COIN doctrine speaks more to the weakness of existing doctrine of the time than to the genius of FM 3-24…