Customer Reviews

A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq (Yale Library of Military History)

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"A Question of Command" is head and shoulders above its contemporaries when it comes to objectively distilling counterinsurgency theory. The first thing you will notice is that Moyar's treatment of competing theories is comprehensive and the book is extremely well documented and footnoted. Very professional.

The central theme of Moyar's work is the theory that counterinsurgency is "leader-centric" warfare, a contest between elites in which the elites with the superior leadership attributes usually win.

I was pre-disposed to discard this theory, but thought, "it may be an interesting book anyway." Well you can teach an old dog new tricks. His articulate and well documented arguments caused me to reconsider my biases and pre-conceived notions about the role of leadership in counter-insurgency warfare. You see, anybody can say "leadership is the key." But not everybody can get down in the weeds and spell out the specifics where both good and bad leadership made a substantive difference. This man does excellent, in-depth research is a good writer too.

Mr. Moyar's uses case studies, some of which are a bit remote from mainstream counterinsurgency literature, e.g. the Civil War, Reconstruction in the South (a major eye-opener for me), The Philippine Insurrection, The Huk Rebellion, Malaya, Vietnam, the Salvadoran Insurgency, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Vietnam was especially interesting. There is a prevailing logic as to how and why we "lost in Vietnam." I am not going to be a spoiler. I am a Vietnam "Era" Vet, and I encourage other Vets to read the book, especially this Chapter. I think it sets the record straight about a lot of half-truths and politically correct journalist accounts that were flat incorrect.

While Moyar forcefully puts forth his hypotheses on leadership as the key factor, he simultaneously castigates "ethnocentric" American civilian and military leaders that had little or no appreciation for Vietnamese culture and values (this hubris is not restricted to Vietnam, but is endemic to all counter-insurgency wars) Assumptions about the universal appeal of American political and cultural norms coupled with a lack of appreciation for the host country's culture was a formula for failure. Moyar's assessment of the Diem régime is most telling in this regard. My only complaint is that I cannot share his esteem for the leadership abilities of Gen. Creighton Abrams. I remember all too well how General Abrams encouraged the court martial of Col. Bob Rheault, then commander of 7th Special Forces,over the "termination" of a double-agent. I never thought Abrams, a straight-leg tanker, was a friend to special operations.

His chapters on Iraq and Afghanistan are also enlightening and credible. He had excellent access to a variety of Army and Marine leaders and leaves no doubt about sources and attributions. He also went "to the field" and saw those wars first hand. Those are not my wars; but Moyar gives me a true narrative of war seen through the eyes of men doing the fighting.

Finally, I think he opens a very credible, and new research stream for those interested in counter-insurgency, i.e. COIN leadership and elites. He readily admits that counterinsurgency operations are complex and highly context dependent; but demonstrated there are leadership attributes, measurable and observable, that successful COIN operations have in common from the American Civil War to our current conflicts.

Good job! I highly recommend the book.

Mark Moyar has a reputation for going against the academic grain. One of his previous books, "Triumph Forsaken," is a full-throated, unapologetic defense of assassinated South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem and US involvement in Vietnam in general. His inability to land a tenure track position at any American university despite his glittering resume (summa cum laude from Harvard, D.Phil from Cambridge), presumably because of his conservative viewpoints, has been the subject of debate in the academy - and a civil lawsuit.

In this, his most recent piece, on the hot topic of counterinsurgency, Moyar takes aim, indirectly, at the celebrated US Army / Marine Corps COIN Manual published in 2006, which focuses on population centric doctrine as the touchstone for a successful COIN campaign. The author's main thesis is that good leadership - defined as a combination of charisma, creativity, sociability, flexibility, empathy and morality - is just about the only thing that really matters. To paraphrase Lance Armstrong, "It's not about the book" -- it's about the man. Moyar uses nine case studies, all of which but one (Malay Emergency) were US experiences, to demonstrate his point, both in the positive, examples where good leaders made all the difference, and the negative, where the lack of such leadership led to failure, often despite the use of population centric COIN best practices.

Moyar has dug up some great quotes from legends to support his case. One of my favorites comes from Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who was asked by Winston Churchill to opine on the situation in Malaya at a time when things were particularly bleak for the British cause. Monty's plain spoken response is a gem and encapsulates Moyar's central argument: "To determine what must be done is only half the answer, and the easiest half; that of itself will not achieve success. In all this welter of trouble 'the man' is what counts. The second half of the answer is to produce good men, really good men, who have the courage to issue the necessary orders, the drive to insist that those orders are carried out, and the determination and will-power to see the thing through to the end." The end result was the selection of Sir Gerald Templer, the COIN leader par excellance, according to Moyar, a man who almost single-handedly turned around the entire campaign for the British.

Two other quotes of note come from Vietnam, Moyar's academic specialty. Robert Komer, the head of COORDS and a leader Moyar describes as effective but hampered by his abrasive style, once said, "I started out looking at Vietnam as a problem in resource allocation, and ended up looking at Vietnam more as a problem in getting the right Vietnamese in the right jobs." (For the record, this review is being submitted from Kandahar, Afghanistan, where I'm serving with the NATO forces in a counterinsurgency role, and based on my ground level experience here, I couldn't agree more.)

The next comes from General Creighton Abrams, a COIN leader of rare skill, according to the author, on par with Templer, even. "Leadership - where that's good, they're good. Where it's mediocre, they're mediocre. Where it's piss poor, they're piss poor. It's just that simple. We've had some very dramatic examples here of where one man has changed - one man, just the commander, and in a month and a half's time you've got an entirely new outfit. Used to be flat on its ass, wouldn't go anywhere, couldn't fight. Only changed one man - transformed the whole thing."

But for every Templer and Abrams - or Ramon Magsaysay (Philippines / Huk), General David Petreaus (Iraq), General Carlos Vides Casanova (El Salvador), Brigadier General Franklin Bell (Philippines Insurrection), or Major General Henry Halleck (US Civil War Missouri occupation) - there are numerous uninspiring or failed COIN leaders, many of whom proved their leadership abilities in other capacities, such as conventional warfare or political administration, such Philip Sheridan (Texas and Louisiana during Reconstruction), Sir Henry Gourney (Malaya), General Elwell Otis (Philippines Insurrection), Ambassadors Elbridge Dubrow and Henry Cabot Lodge (Vietnam), and Lt. General (ret.) Jay Garner and Ricardo Sanchez (Iraq).

There's no denying that good leadership is important, perhaps even critical, in COIN operations. But what highly competitive group endeavor doesn't require strong leadership as a sine qua non for success? Is there any Fortune 500 corporation or championship athletic team that gets by on "best practices" or individual talent alone? I don't think so. There were aspects of this book that reminded me of another highly acclaimed historical piece on counterinsurgency, John Nagl's "Eating Soup with a Knife." Nagl's central thesis is that armies that exhibit traits of a "learning organization" are more effective at counterinsurgency that those that don't. No surprise there. Likewise, is it really surprising that armies with strong, charismatic, empathetic and inspiring leaders perform better than those with out?

Moyar concludes with a number of recommendations based on the insights from his nine case studies. Paramount and most peculiar is a call for the focused military recruiting of certain personality types, specifically those with INTJ personalities on the Myers-Briggs scale. I certainly guffawed when reading this section, although my opinion was slightly muted by the fact that I'm an INTJ currently in a COIN role in southern Afghanistan, so it was a modest personal fillip. Moyar's core argument is that the military is a naturally sensing-judging organization and tends to attract and promote sensing-judging personalities, rather than the intuitive-thinking types most critical, in his opinion, to COIN leadership.

Moyar's other recommendations are more level-headed. He emphasizes the need in selecting credible leaders of quality for the military and civil leadership of the host nation security forces at the expense of quantity, even if that means welcoming back men from the old regime or with questionable backgrounds. Furthermore, the author notes that one of the primary jobs of the military commander is to constantly assess his leadership team, promoting and firing commanders frequently in accordance with their performance. He frequently highlights how effective COIN leaders like Templer, Magsaysay and Petreaus were always on the go and visiting the field, while the COIN failures like Otis, Gourney and Sanchez spent most of their time cooped up in an office behind a pile of paperwork. Finally, Moyar stresses the criticality of empowering traditional elites to the greatest extent possible. He frequently equates the US experience in Iraq to the federal government during Reconstruction (he says the preferred analogy to post-war Germany is flawed), where local elites were dismissed wholesale and replaced with largely incompetent outsiders with an innate hostility to the indigenous population and where significant social and economic programs, including elections, contribute little and have the potential to be extremely damaging. Indeed, Moyar has strong words for elections in COIN strategy. "Democracy in counterinsurgency is like dynamite in a coal mine, capable of reshaping the environment to the user's advantage or of destroying everything, the user included."

In closing, Moyar's clarion call for leaders of substance and dedication in undeniably valid. His case studies are mostly well done, although the one on Iraq is long and occasionally acerbic in tone, while the case study of Afghanistan is light and superficial. I must say that the urgency I know feel to identify Afghans, particularly local Pashtuns of ability and traditional leadership status, has been heightened after reading this book.

I know it's a cliché, but I really wanted to like this book. I had just gotten back from Afghanistan, and Moyar's thesis - that leadership is the critical element of counterinsurgency - tracked with a great deal of my experience on the ground. My master's work focused on terrorism and insurgency, and I hoped that I would be reading something that would expand my intellectual horizons on a topic of importance to me personally as well as to the U.S. and the West presently.

Moyar's book fails spectacularly on all counts, which unfortunately only serves to undermine his thesis (which I actually think deserves a far better and more studious examination than the one he provides here). There are two major flaws, in my mind, and I'll discuss each in turn.

This book's first gaping flaw is that it fails to actually define insurgency, which any serious student of counterinsurgency literature should notice. It's a flaw that permeates the entire book, as Moyar conflates guerrilla warfare (a tactic) with insurgency (a political-military entity designed to overthrow a government via asymmetric means). This is particularly evident in his case studies (for which he never provides selection rationale, an unforgivable oversight in political science), where he lumps in Reconstruction with El Salvador and Iraq. Moyar's (incorrect) conception of insurgency is essentially a military strategy of asymmetry through force of arms - guerrilla warfare - completely ignoring the political dimensions, most pertinent among them legitimacy.

Ironically, this sets up his analysis to basically argue that insurgencies can thus best be understood as contests between elites, with the side with better elites emerging as the victor. While that may be true at the tactical level of guerrilla engagements, this Focoist (Leninist/Guevaraist) conception of insurgency has been fairly roundly discredited in contemporary literature. Interestingly, Moyar doesn't address Maoist insurgencies at all, which focus on the population as a center of gravity. While contemporary literature is not necessarily correct, it puts the burden on Moyar to prove his point in terms of quality and quantity of evidence, which he fails to do. As a side note, Moyar in several cases gets so caught up in his own revisionist history (Vietnam in particular but also El Salvador) that he strays from his central thesis.

The second flaw is the organization and layout of the book. Moyar essentially creates a topology of leadership attributes, naming 10 (and throwing in an extra one or two for good measure) as key attributes for counterinsurgency leaders. He then meanders between leaders and leadership attributes, occasionally returning to his topology but more often than not ignoring it. He seems to select leaders within various conflicts at random - selection criteria would have been even more useful here - and has a couple of odd choices for "great COIN leaders," like Creighton Abrams in Vietnam. (This is likely a product of Moyar's historical revisionism - the 2nd half of the Vietnam War was a conventional force-on-force contest between the US/ARVN and NVA, so I'm not sure how COIN leadership is relevant.)

If this book were well-organized, it would have measured a sampling of leaders from various insurgencies against those attributes, found which attributes were present in each case, and then drawn conclusions from that. (A case study method focusing on individual leaders rather than conflicts would also have been an improvement.) Unfortunately, Moyar appears to have fallen prey to the intellectual trap of trying to prove something he devoutly believes instead of testing a hypothesis in an objective manner. While this might be forgivable from a first-year graduate student, it's unacceptable from anyone trying to make a serious scholarly contribution to a field of study.

Moyar is not an insurgency expert, a run-of-the-mill historian, or an established academic - all of which shines through in this book that tries to do far too much with the intellectual equivalent of Swiss cheese backing it. I would love to see his thesis tested rigorously without a predetermined outcome, and I would be curious as to how one might measure rigorously the attributes Moyar lists - N.B. Myers-Briggs is not rigorous - and how one might best select leaders in various insurgencies so as to get a wide sampling of good, bad, and mediocre leaders and see how they stack up differently against his hypothesis. But in that sense, it's like building a house of cards - because Moyar doesn't have basic expertise in insurgency nor does he have conventional historical views, his entire book is built on a very weak foundation and falls apart when you realize his core assumptions range from questionable to simply incorrect or incomplete.

I think I know where Moyar was coming from - this book is aimed at a military audience that wants to deal with the military side of the equation, but that's at best half of any insurgency. The study of insurgency and counterinsurgency isn't simple enough that you can simply cleave the political and the military apart and have any kind of serious analysis. Clausewitz's overly paraphrased dictum, "War is merely the continuation of politics by other means," rings particularly true of the insurgent decision to use violence (and is reflected in the historical struggle of virtually every true insurgency he examines) to force a political change.

It's also worth noting that his policy recommendations - or what pass for them at the end of the book - are either poor or basically non-existent, and ignore a whole field in how you develop leaders and/or organizations and organizational culture. A forgivable offense as that would take an already-sclerotic analysis over a bridge too far, but it would actually give the book a little more heft.

In short, Moyar fails to make a serious contribution to the literature on counterinsurgency. His book suffers from analytic and structural flaws and he never tests his thesis in a rigorous manner. You can disagree with some of Moyar's historical viewpoints, which theoretically doesn't doom his thesis, but the complete lack of analytic rigor makes this a non-starter. (It's also generally unacceptable in academia to use your own work as primary evidence of your thesis, as Moyar does with his Vietnam chapter.) It doesn't open up a new field of study in counterinsurgency; rather, it simply shows how little Moyar actually knows about the subject.

I would point those who are serious about getting smart on insurgency to Bard O'Neill's Insurgency and Terrorism: From Revolution to Apocalypse, Second Edition, Revised and on counterinsurgency to John Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. The latter, in my mind, shows what analytic rigor looks like when applied to the study of insurgency - anyone who is interested in counterinsurgency study would do well to take notes.

There is much to praise about Moyar's work here. He presents nine excellent case studies of counterinsurgencies, some of which succeeded and some of which failed. If the early cases - the Civil War and Reconstruction - leave you thirsting for more, that is because few writers have looked at these as "insurgencies" and Moyar's cases lay the groundwork for more detailed study.

Also, his chapter on Vietnam is spectacular. For those of us who have drunk the Kool-Aid of popular histories, his appreciation of Ngo Dinh Diem is an eye-opener. I would have liked more references to the source material in his footnotes, instead of his own book, but that well-regarded work is fully footnoted, so I will just have to go to it. Also, although I was somewhat skeptical of his theme of the centrality of leadership when I began the book, he soon convinced me of the correctness of this view.

However, I am not so keen on the only case study of which I have personal knowledge - the current Afghan conflict. Although his general analysis is solid, there are details and analyses which are unsatisfactory. First, and I may be reading too much into his text here, he seems to share the sentiment of Peter Galbraith and the Obama Administration that you can topple the local government with impunity. This is surprising for a writer so clear headed about the results of the US-promoted Diem coup. You either dance with the one that brung ya or you leave. You don't try to rearrange the government to suit the foreigners' needs. The successor will never get the street cred that he needs.

Second, like almost every Westerner I've read on the subject, he fails to realize the attraction of corruption in a country like Afghanistan. Corruption is a combination welfare system and intelligence network. If you are in a position of authority, you are expected to skim as much revenue as you can from your official duties. But you don't pocket it; you pass it down to employees, fellow tribe members, family and many others. No one makes a livable wage, so you use this to supplement their income. In return, the recipients owe you loyalty and information. I used to marvel how, if you told something to a janitor, by the end of the week a cabinet member would have been aware of what you said. This is a neat and efficient system which provides a valuable local function and while we may be able to channel it to useful ends, we will never be able to end it. Moyar's blanket condemnation of corruption is off the mark.

And so is his condemnation of warlords. Some of them are very good indeed. They need to go, but one has to be aware of the delicacy of the situation. They provided the bulk of the forces to topple both the Russians and the Taliban. To turn yesterday's heroes into today's goats is not an easy thing to do. Imagine the uproar if, after the American Revolution, the French who helped us gain independence suddenly decreed that Washington was a warlord who needed to be ousted and that, oh, say, Button Gwinnett had to be installed as President. We face the same situation there.

Finally, and most seriously, he doesn't even mention the role of Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador from late 2003 through 2005 in his text. I had the honor of serving under him in 2004 and 2005 and his leadership highlights Moyar's own theme. Moyar mentions that during that period, warlords were being brought under control, but he doesn't say why or how. The reason we had a moment of sunshine in the Afghan conflict was largely because of the character, courage and intelligence of Ambassador Khalilzad. I remember one time, when he ordered a flight of B-52s to fly over the capital city of a warlord who was being particularly obstreperous. The B-52s dropped no bombs, but they flew very low and very noisily. "I have to show him that I am a bigger warlord than he is," Zal told us. That is the stuff of leadership.

Despite my reservations, this is a solid contribution to the subject of counterintelligence and well worth the time invested by even the professionals.

Moyar's book is a "must-read" for any serious student of current events, counterinsurgency, or operational art. As a military professional who has read most recent works that have been heralded as "must-reads" or as works providing unusual or original insights into counterinsurgency, I have been disappointed the vast-majority of the time. Rarely have I read anything on counterinsurgency that provided true "food-for-thought" other than that which was produced by Galula, Kitson, or Thompson; however, Moyar has produced a volume that may be as influential as those written by the Big 3 COIN savants. The book is very well organized; providing overwhelming evidence for the author's hypothesis in a manner that does not become repetitive and boring.

Being a student of counterinsurgency, I looked forward to reading A Question of Command as a fresh perspective on the topic. Moyar's thesis of leadership being preeminent appeared to be somewhat novel and I went in with an open mind hoping to be convinced.

I finished the book disappointed and regretting my purchase. It suffers from a long list of problems, a few of which I will summarize here in the hope of warning others off this book.

Moyar argues for his theory on the evidence of several case studies. Unfortunately, he fails to explain his methodology in choosing the cases and the anecdotes he reports within them. This is a basic fundamental of using case studies. The reader is left to wonder on what basis the case studies were chosen and can only assume that the main criteria was whatever fit the author's argument. Some of the choices (the Civil War and Reconstruction most notably) are poor examples when looking for lessons to apply to modern counterinsurgency. Moreover, this being social science and involving human subjects, there is no way to control for other factors in the cases presented: a very good leader may be put in an exceedingly difficult situation and fail and vice versa.

The vision of insurgency (which Moyar never defines) presented in this book is confusing and inaccurate. He routinely conflates guerrilla warfare (a military tactic common to many insurgencies) with insurgency itself (which is a political phenomenon). For instance, the entire Civil War was an insurgency yet Moyar chooses to distinguish between the more conventional campaigns and the guerrilla campaigns. The author over-empathizes the military aspects of rebellion at the expense of the political aspects and larger context, which are often more important in determining final outcomes. Finally, he give short-shrift to insurgency in itself--arguing at one point that insurgents are just people motivated by capable revolutionary leaders (a very Lenin/Guevara perspective). He gives no credit to nationalism or relative deprivation as motivating factors, which is dangerous and foolhardy. Essentially if one is to believe Moyar, a high value targeting campaign that assassinates an insurgency's leaders would end an insurgency outright.

Moyar's main claim to fame outside of this book is his historical revisionism, particularly of the Vietnam War, so I was not surprised to see it represented within these pages. In some cases where its fits his argument, such as the Huk Rebellion, he presents a very mainstream view of the history. His Vietnam chapter however is a mess and throws out haphazard assertions that are not clearly supported by the bulk of evidence and rejected by serious historians. One common theme throughout many of the chapters is a frankly sad reliance on an outdated Cold War-era view of monolithic communism where local leaders are puppets on strings of a larger international communist conspiracy. Such views have long been discredited but that does not seem to bother Moyar.

The concluding chapters of non-fiction works such as this are often disappointing because the author will have just spent most of the book describing an intractable problem and then fail to offer satisfactory options for future action. This book falls into this trap and then some. The most concrete suggestion that Moyar presents is the use of Myers-Briggs testing to screen leadership candidates--which is not very rigorous to say the least and could be easily gamed by careerist officers. Other possible suggestions such as 360-degree performance reviews go unmentioned.

Finally, one may be able to forgive this book's many flaws if it was a good read. It is most decidedly not. The case studies themselves tend to ramble along, often jumping between examples without much structure. There are no headings or consistent organization within them. The book is in desperate need of a better editor to cut out extraneous historical detail and add in missing context.

In summary, the book left me bored and confused and without any additional understanding of counterinsurgency. I recommend against its purchase and in its place would recommend Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958 by David Galula or if one was seeking a much better set of case studies, Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare edited by Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian.

I like the dynamics this author writes on winning counterinsurgency wars (small wars, guerrilla wars, limited, unconventional... whatever you'd like to title them). Leadership definitely "makes or breaks" any war. The talents and skills they 'should' have or educate themselves on, is paramount. As described in the book, people cannot be experts at everything, but there are common characteristics to leadership (ie- integrity, creativity, inginuity, etc.)Leaders at every level (and type -political/military/etc) need to be able to assess the current environment, and decide how to "attack" the situation.

The short history sections aren't too long, but provide enough background to get the authors' idea. Most people are atleast familiar with the events discussed.

This book should be on any officers' recommended reading list.

Moyar's thesis makes sense: counter-insurgent strategies have only worked when implemented through engaged leadership. Moyar makes a very strong case that insurgencies, whether one hundred and fifty years ago or five years ago, consistently relied, and continue to rely, on a standard tool bag for success, and that successful counter-insurgencies had strong leaders with a consistent set of personality traits all tied to initiative, judgment, and empathy- in short, adaptability.

Is it a "must read"? Most of it is because of his general argument: Implementation of a counterinsurgency plan, no matter how well thought out on paper, requires a creative leader completely dialed into the complexity of counterinsurgency. My only criticism of the book is that the writing is not consistently succinct. Parts are well written, some go on a bit. Generally, if you're a serious student of the topic, you will want to at least read chapters "Leader-Centric Warfare", "Reconstruction in the South", "The Malayan Emergency", "The Vietnam War", and "How to Win". If he tightened up the book, I'd give it a 5.

In sum, I'm a predisposed fan of small unit leadership so Moyar's thinking tracks mine. Even if you disagree with Moyar, read parts of the book and debate it- test it. And by the way, while Moyar is obviously disposed toward the Marine Corp, he does not turn the book into a "marine way" over "the army way" argument. He treats both services objectively, contrasting the two for purely academic purposes.

This book belongs in the top tier of counterinsurgency and irregular warfare reading, because it offers a powerful alternative to the conventional wisdom, and because no other book has analyzed leadership across insurgencies. Like the author's previous works, it marshals an impressive mixture of facts and insights to challenge deeply entrenched convictioins. No single book can be the bible on counterinsurgency, and readers who have extensive familiarity with COIN will not agree entirely with any one author's conclusions, but there are a few must-reads, and this is one. It is widely read among the U.S. military's counterinsurgency practitioners today, and it is used in training Afghanistan's security forces.

The author rejects the two main schools of thought on counterinsurgency--the "enemy-centric" and "population-centric" schools--because they focus too much on methods rather than leaders and both the enemy and population are crucial. Counterinsurgency is "leader-centric," says Moyar, because the success of all insurgencies (even, or perhaps especially, Maoist "people's wars") depends on capable and motivated elites. Defeating them likewise requires counterinsurgent elites of strong capabilities and motivation. These points are well supported by nine case studies that include most of the major insurgencies waged or supported by the United States from the Civil War onwards, plus the Malayan Emergency.

The main objections raised in the negative reviews of this book are unconvincing, at best. Much is made of an alleged failure to define insurgency and conflation of insurgency with guerrilla warfare, yet the author actually defines insurgency using the U.S. military's official definition (p. 303), and goes on to explain that terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and conventional warfare are all forms of armed conflict that insurgents employ. Serious readers already know what insurgency is, and don't stand to benefit from splitting hairs over terminology. Besides, I think this book's conclusions apply regardless of what definition of insurgency is used.

Contrary to a couple of the reviews, the author does address the political dimensions of these conflicts. In the case of Reconstruction, for instance, Moyar notes that the U.S. government's disfranchisement of Confederate veterans and its insistence on racial equality drove the elites of the South into insurgency. In the Afghanistan chapter, the decision to empower Afghan warlords after the overthrow of the Taliban resulted in governmental criminality that dissipated support for Karzai's government and put the counterinsurgency into the hole that it has never escaped from. Poor governance is repeatedly cited as a leading instigator of insurgency.

The author does not make continuous reference to the ten key leadership attributes or assess each and every leader according to these attributes. Instead, he does more showing than telling, and relies on an accumulation of evidence over multiple cases because there is not enough information on these cases to exhaustively examine all aspects of COIN leadership (see p. 12). As someone who has read many of the histories of the individual insurgencies and who is now paying closer attention to leadership issues, I think it is fair to say that the historical sources do not provide enough information to rate each leader according to all ten of the criteria. Furthermore, as the author argues, the biggest challenge is not figuring out what types of leadership are required, but rather developing leaders and getting them into the right jobs, so those topics receive much of the book's attention. Anyone who thinks producing and placing leaders in COIN is not very difficult or not very important has only the most superficial understanding of COIN.

The one quibble I have with the book is that the Afghanistan chapter is too short. I would have liked to see more detail and analysis of American and Afghan leadership, particularly in the first years of the insurgency. That point notwithstanding, anyone who wants a deep understanding of counterinsurgency should read "A Question of Command," in addition to such classics as David Galula's "Counterinsurgency Warfare," John McCuen's "The Art of Counter-Revolutionary Warfare," the Marine Corps Small Wars Manual, FM 3-24, and histories like Brian Linn's "The Philippine War" and Bing West's books on Iraq and Afghanistan.

A quick scan of the first chapter of "A Question of Command" would suggest considerable potential for an original and insightful contribution to COIN theory. Moyer declares that the two most common COIN schools of thought ("population-centric" and "enemy-centric", respectively) are inadequate models to understand insurgency, and suggests instead that insurgencies are ultimately a clash between insurgent and counterinsurgent leadership elites - the most effective leadership cadre will prevail, regardless of efforts to address social/economic concerns or tactical effectiveness against insurgents. Moyar then helpfully offers up ten key attributes by which to measure the effectiveness of counterinsurgent leaders, with the implication that these are different qualities (or at least found and required in different quantities) than those required in more conventional activities. After recently reviewing Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare PB (Companion) and finding the lack of a unifying theme a distracting weakness, this approach offered the promise of providing some real coherent insights.

Unfortunately, however, the nine subsequent case studies and concluding chapter (or "How to Win") do not, despite some insights, do not quite live up to this promise. Firstly, in his case studies Moyar makes relatively little use of his "ten attributes" - his identification of effective leadership at the strategic or operational level often looks markedly similar to successful leadership in more conventional or traditional contexts - combine decentralisation of authority to effective subordinates with effective oversight, energetically pursue the timely execution of plans, etc, etc, while his criteria for identifying effective tactical leaders almost seems to be "reverse engineering" if X was successful, therefore his leadership was the decisive factor (whatever his style or the other factors involved). There is remarkably little discussion of the difference between the creativity vs. flexibility demonstrated by effective leaders, for example, as implied by the first chapter, which had the potential to add considerable interest.

For a theory of COIN that revolves around a clash of leadership elites, there is relatively little discussion of the leadership qualities (or indeed, the defining characteristics and differences in each insurgency considered) demonstrated by insurgents or their effects. The narrow selection of case studies have helped support some of the authors pre-conceived views, and some of his more contentious assertions (for example, that primacy of command in COIN should always be vested in military personnel and agencies, that civilian agencies are invariably less effective than military, and that effective leadership is far more important that effective political policy) would not be supported so easily from a wider range of case studies. Why, for example, did French tactical success (and indisputably effective leadership) in "The Battle for Algiers" not translate into strategic success if political and social policy is far less relevant?

The concluding chapter does not neatly present a convincing, insightful argument supported by coherent evidence from the rest of the book - again, there is little use of the "ten attributes" as an analytical tool, and the author's conclusions are either relatively banal and obvious or contradictory. I would actually rate this as a 3 1/2 star book if Amazon would let me - there are some interesting insights/observations and provocative arguments, and Moyar's view of insurgency as a clash of leadership elites is worthy of further consideration. However, Moyar hasn't really succeeded in convincing the reader that COIN is "leader-centric" rather than that traditional effective military leadership is a key enabler to a successful COIN strategy, or that his COIN leadership attributes are actually much different from desirable leadership qualities in other military contexts.