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looking toward the future of warfare and only seeing irregular war and counterinsurgency in
the way the Thompson and Galula envisioned fighting them in the early 1960s.
Historian Brian Linn in masterful intellectual history of the United States Army, The Echo
of Battle: The Army’s Way of War, identifies three intellectual trends that have dominated
the American Army’s thinking since its inception. The first intellectual theme has revolved
around the notion of protection of the American homeland. Linn’s second theme is centered
on the notion of the science of managing wars. And the third intellectual theme within the
American Army that Linn identifies is of a heroic vision of war. Linn argues that there has not
been an established and accepted “way of war” within the army. Instead conceptions of war
within the American Army have been highly contingent, contextual, and contentious. The
“echo of battle” has pushed and pulled these three intellectual trends in the Army in different
directions toward war and conflict over the years.
56
In a recent review of Linn’s book, John Nagl sees the Army’s consummation with coun-
terinsurgency as proof that it has finally broken out of the intellectual box that Linn’s three
intellectual groups within the Army has kept it locked into. However, after a close reading
57
of Linn’s book one could also conclude that especially after World War II and the rise of the
counterinsurgency intellectuals (like Thompson, Galula, and today Mansoor and Nagl) that
counterinsurgency is actually a fourth intellectual theme with its own narrow and carefully
defined predisposition about war and conflict, and with its own discrete view of the future. In
this sense the counterinsurgency officers are hearing their own, narrow echo of counterinsur-
gency battle to the exclusion of other forms of war that might be looming on the horizon.
Perhaps the American way of war that Linn so expertly describes and analyzes is by its
nature contentious like the democracy that it serves. In this sense the contention between the
four intellectual themes might be as good as we can get it. If nothing else the tension between
the disparate groups might keep us from falling dangerously into one or the other. And that
seems to be the real issue at hand and the danger that the American Army is in today with its
hyper-emphasis on counterinsurgency warfare.
A senior military advisor to Soviet Premier Josef Stalin in 1939 told him that mecha-
nized warfare involving tanks and mobile infantry would never happen in the future. How

and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (New York: McGraw Hill 2001); An attempt to revise Herring’s ultimate conclu-
sion that the war was unwinnable is Lewis Sorley’s deeply flawed interpretation that the Vietnam could have
been won if the American people had not lost their will and supported the purported successful efforts of
Westmoreland’s replacement General Abrams, Lewis Sorley A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and
Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam, (New York: Harcourt Brace 1999); also see Andrew Kre-
pinevich’s The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1986), Krepinevich’s
book was an important contribution to explaining the American Army in Vietnam but like Sorley’s flawed
work falls into the trap of believing that the American army could have won the war if it had done a better job
at practicing classic counterinsurgency operations along the lines of Galula and Thompson. For more current
and better histories of the American Army in Vietnam see Andrew Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and
Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1942-1976 (Washington, D.C., US Army Center for Military History
2006); and Dale Andrade “Westmoreland Was Right: Learning the Wrong Lessons from the Vietnam War,”
Small Wars and Insurgencies, vol. 19, no. 2 (June 2008).
56 Brian McAllister Linn, The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press
2007), 1-9.
57 John A. Nagl’s review of Echo of Battle.