Jocko Willink on military: what the evidence says · JRE #1391
SUBJECT: MILITARY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
I had read the, the counterinsurgency manual that was written by general Petraeus. And, and I, part of that explains that the average counterinsurgency takes seven years to work itself out.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Willink attributed to the Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual (FM 3-24, published under General David Petraeus's direction in 2006) a specific claim that "the average counterinsurgency takes seven years to work itself out." FM 3-24 does discuss counterinsurgencies as typically protracted, multi-year campaigns and cautions against expecting quick victories, but the publicly available text of the manual does not contain a sourced statistic pinning the average duration at seven years; that specific figure is not traceable to the document. Independent empirical research on historical counterinsurgencies, including RAND Corporation's analysis of 30 resolved insurgencies from 1978-2008 (used partly to validate FM 3-24's tenets), finds counterinsurgency campaigns have historically run considerably longer on average, with commonly cited figures in the counterinsurgency literature clustering closer to a decade or more rather than seven years. The "seven years" figure appears to be a rounded approximation or misremembering commonly repeated in popular and military commentary rather than a verified statistic drawn directly from FM 3-24's text. Overall, the general premise that counterinsurgencies are lengthy, multi-year undertakings is well-supported, but the specific attribution of a "seven-year average" to the Petraeus-era field manual is not corroborated by the manual's actual content or by the leading empirical studies on counterinsurgency duration.