America’s Pressing Counterinsurgency Problem
America’s Pressing Counterinsurgency Problem
America’s capacity for foreign conflict is dangerously low and a threat to our security.
(President Trump’s air and missile strikes represent the upper limit of American offensive action. | SOURCES: Bloomberg and Business Standard)
If any one attribute can describe President Donald Trump, it is boldness. His recent strikes on the Houthis in Yemen, which have continued into recent days, have shown Trump’s renewed willingness to exert American power in the Middle East. Yet, Trump still must form a coherent plan for U.S. military policy in the Middle East, lest we continue the same airstrike-based whack-a-mole strategy against a revolving door of enemies, with no plan for achieving lasting peace.
The United States is no longer the world’s sole, preeminent superpower, and its military has seen strategic failure in many of its major combat operations this century. Unable to realize its vision of a stable Iraq or a democratic Afghanistan, where does the year 2025 find the U.S. military regarding its capability and willingness to conduct counterinsurgency and counterterrorist operations?
Three main issues face America and our quest to find an end to the endless wars we have been fighting over the last several decades: the United States can no longer be confident fighting a war against any nation in the world; intervening globally is unpopular among Americans; and our current form of power projection in areas like the Middle East, based on air and missile strikes, is fundamentally flawed.
The United States could not be confident entering a future global war, featuring a deeply flawed military-industrial base that turns our expensive military into something of a paper tiger: scary on the outside, but with little substance. While this is an issue in its own right, regarding the regional conflicts that America has become involved in, the U.S. lacks the strength to deter rival powers from supporting its opponents in a proxy war.
We can see the degradation of American military hegemony by looking at a potential Sino-American conflict. For decades, it has been assumed that the American military advantage over China was significant enough to keep it dominant in the South China Sea, but this is no longer true.
Numerous simulations of potential warfare between the two powers have been run, primarily centered around a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. While they often have opposing results, one throughline undergirds most simulations: the United States would suffer appalling casualties and catastrophic damage to its military, with victory uncertain.
The difficulty that the United States would encounter in defending Taiwan, particularly without incurring catastrophic damage to its Pacific fleet, adds to America’s military issues, which extend beyond the battlefield. While polling on the issue is scattered, public opinion supporting American military intervention to defend Taiwan rarely reaches even a plurality of the American public.
The U.S.’s experience in funding and providing munitions for the Ukrainian war effort and the challenges it has exposed in American military manufacturing also demonstrate the limits of U.S. effectiveness in any sizable war. The Army Science Board’s 2023 report noted “systemic issues” in the Army’s production supply chain. The Science Board pointed out several underperforming sectors in the U.S. military production apparatus: lack of surge capacity in critical areas, a condensed defense contracting sector that leaves little room for innovation, inconsistent military budgets that have pushed sizable areas of military manufacturing offshore, convoluted supply chains, and more.
America is no longer in a place akin to after the fall of the Soviet Union, when it reigned as the unrivaled global superpower. We do not live in a time like the Persian Gulf War, where the United States could afford to concentrate much of its military in one area to steamroll its enemy. Nor do we live in a time when a foreign war would likely have the support of four out of five Americans like the Gulf War, with support for U.S. airstrikes against Russia (42%) or sending U.S. troops to support Ukraine (30%), an analogous action to Operation Desert Storm, being heavily unpopular.
The United States could face another situation like the wars in Vietnam or Korea, where one of a handful of countries would be unafraid to openly support America’s opponent in a proxy war, perhaps even directly fighting American troops. The implications of China being able to stand up to the United States military mean that Beijing would likely be unafraid to oppose it in a proxy war over mutually valued regions.
A U.S. military intervention in Africa, a continent with many resource-rich areas, would confront a region awash with Chinese investment from the Belt and Road Initiative. Africa, containing some of the richest deposits of the Earth’s rare metals, is a region primed for further American intervention.
Yet, potential opposition to a U.S. intervention begs the question: will America willingly involve itself in another long-term foreign war? Unless forced to fight a rival power, will it become involved in another asymmetric conflict against a weaker state? Can the American military and public stomach more counterinsurgency warfare?
The United States Armed Forces has often experienced tactical success, but rarely strategic, theatre- or conflict–wide success fighting insurgents. In his 2020 memoir, The American Way of Irregular War, Lieutenant General Charles T. Cleveland argues two seemingly contrary points from the outset: that American forces do well during irregular fighting, even succeeding “in every irregular warfare mission” that the former head of United States Army Special Operations Command oversaw, and that the “U.S. military is not well organized for irregular warfare campaigns.”
While Cleveland meritoriously criticizes the U.S. military’s organization, the issue with American involvement in irregular and counterinsurgency warfare, which American occupations of countries often devolve into, is more political than military. In 2025, it would be political suicide for a president to involve the United States in a protracted counterinsurgency conflict. Americans lack the patience to allow those counterinsurgency methods that have proved effective in the past, primarily in Iraq, to achieve lasting results.
American counterinsurgency efforts have occasionally proven successful on the ground, with General David Petraeus’s experiences occupying Mosul, northern Iraq, in 2003 demonstrating the merits of holistic counterinsurgency practices on the ground, but also their long-term untenability. Petraeus’s command in the city can only be described as “nation building.” Arriving in a city with a crumbling infrastructure, a lawless lack of authority, and a dearth of civil services, Petraeus held elections, restored energy access and water and sanitation services, and even started classes at Mosul University again. He integrated his command into the region, providing optimal security and building trust and visibility with the local population.
(Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, left, walks with de facto Iraqi leader Paul Bremer, right, in Mosul, Iraq, in May of 2003. | SOURCE: Politico)
COIN strategies, designed to restore working government and civil society, helped to reduce violence. In many areas of Iraq, the places with the worst functioning utilities and municipal services have the most violence, which was tempered down when services were restored. Petraeus successfully argued for the idea that providing lasting security for the Iraqi people was the only viable exit strategy for the United States.
The problem with the strategy is its perception by the American public: it represents spending significant money and time in a foreign country. Petraeus’s reforms did not come for free, with the commander spending $28 million on his Mosul reconstruction efforts, which pales in comparison to the roughly $3 trillion spent on the war. For a country with a spiking national debt, such spending is unfeasible.
“Clear, hold, and build,” the terminology eventually adopted by the Bush administration when adopting Petraeus’s strategy, was also the opposite of what Americans remembered from their last war against Iraq. Instead of annihilating all opposition in a five-week blaze of glory like the Persian Gulf War, they were now supposed to stay put over months, years even, to help build up local security forces to the point of self-sufficiency.
Public opinion of the Iraq War was a downhill spiral from its inception, with approval being seventeen points lower on its first anniversary than on the first day, a degradation of support that continued over the following years. The lack of feasibility in maintaining public support for such a conflict has led to a military command that is unprepared to conduct such a conflict efficiently.
With an electorate disinterested in expensive, deadly solutions in the Middle East, a precise antithesis to boots on the ground emerged: air-based power projection. It is through this strategy that we can see the benefits and drawbacks of the current American military engagement in the region.
“I just hate bailing Europe out again,” said Vice President J. D. Vance in a now-leaked group chat, reasoning his decision to oppose strikes on Houthi militants in Yemen in March 2025. “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC,” responded Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, agreeing to Vance’s transactional view of international antiterrorism. This unprecedented look into the American national security decision-making process not only demonstrated the genuine belief backing much of the administration’s rhetoric but also the centrality of airstrikes as America’s tools in the Middle East.
(U.S. aircraft launch from an aircraft carrier to conduct airstrikes against Houthi militants in Yemen. | SOURCE: Reuters / U.S. Central Command)
Hegseth would go on to identify the seminal factor in the use of drones to counteract Islamic terror: “we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this.” Since their introduction to the United States’ arsenal in 2002, drone and other airstrikes have become the United States’ primary method of counterinsurgency operations. The last three administrations have seen a massive upward trajectory in the use of drone strikes.
Aerial-based counterinsurgency operations come with many benefits, but also several drawbacks. Remotely operated drones, even airstrikes from manned aircraft, limit the potential for American casualties. Additionally, strikes have been incredibly effective at killing insurgents across multiple administrations, forcing decentralization among insurgent groups for fear of leadership decapitations and mass casualty strikes.
Drone warfare is problematic because it takes the opposite approach to on-the-ground counterinsurgency strategies: it focuses entirely on killing one’s enemy, with no attempts to fix the systemic causes of violence. When General Petraeus entered Mosul, he was not focused on killing as many Iraqi insurgents as possible, which he and other commanders realized was a distraction from their real goal of long-term stability.
Drone warfare directly contradicts Petraeus’s takeaways from the Iraq War, particularly the focus on civilian buy-in to American security and “liv[ing] our values.” Not only is their only quality lethality, but drone strikes often kill more non-targets than targets, including civilians. American use of drone strikes is quite unpopular across the Middle East, even in countries whose governments are friendly to the U.S.
The United States’ counterinsurgency strategy is stuck in an awkward middle ground. Drone warfare, while effective in taking down massive insurgent armies, like those fielded by the Islamic State in the mid-2010s, has proven ineffective in ridding regions of systemic violence, as it fails to address the root causes of instability. Yet, the deployment of American combat troops in unstable areas is tremendously unpopular with Americans of both parties, undermining the possibility for targeted Special Forces counterinsurgency strikes that worked well to reduce violence in surge-era Iraq.
It is uncertain whether the Trump administration will continue with its increased frequency of airstrikes in the Middle East. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has promised “An Americas First Foreign Policy” for the United States, focused on using “America’s considerable leverage to protect” its interests in the “neglected … Western Hemisphere.”
Yet, this should not be construed as isolationism, as President Trump’s “America First Priorities” include foreign intervention. It is important to note two things about President Trump’s recent strikes in Yemen: firstly, that he approved them, keeping with his history of being unafraid to bomb Middle Eastern targets. Secondly, some of his national security team did not object to the strikes on non-interventionist grounds, instead arguing that it did not directly support American interests.
One good aspect of President Trump’s limited approach relates to this second point: his airstrike-based view of counterterrorism is a tailoring of the Bush Doctrine. Accepting a restricted version of its premise of preemptive warfare against potential foreign threats, Trump opposes devoting a large amount of men and military resources in the region, instead maintaining air-based power projection.
A significant American military presence in the Middle East, like those deployed in the Persian Gulf and Iraq Wars, would be devoting considerable resources to a region rapidly becoming devoid of geopolitical significance to America, risking American lives for minimal gain. The United States no longer relies on Middle Eastern oil, as it once did, to fuel its society, with the United States and Canada comprising one-fifth of the world’s oil production.
The downside to Trump’s methods is that the United States Armed Forces is left with limited latitude to operate in regions that truly matter to the United States. The United States has often had a tough time controlling regimes it supports across the world, something that will only increase in an administration hell-bent on cutting foreign aid. The primarily air-strike-based Armed Forces operations conducted over the past decade, primarily American efforts to destroy ISIS during the last two years of the Obama administration and the first months of Trump’s previous administration, additionally focused on equipping local fighters in addition to aerial operations, a form of aid that should continue despite the Trump administration’s recent cuts.
Perhaps the best drone strike, just like the tariffs that President Trump seems suddenly hesitant about, is the one threatened, but not implemented. Recently, in response to Trump administration threats to ramp up airstrikes against Iran-backed militias in Iraq, many of the groups announced plans to disarm.
Mere threats of violence can obfuscate America’s crumbling military-industrial base. They avoid the destabilizing long-term consequences that barrages of airstrikes can bring. Threats unquestionably come cheap, satiating the American public’s desire to have a strong, shiny military that loses as few men and equipment to combat as possible.
It is unclear when, where, and why America’s armed forces will become involved in their next counterinsurgency conflict. Its deteriorating military production complex seems dreadfully underprepared for a long-term conflict, which is made more likely by the possibility of foreign intervention. The American public’s isolationism prevents many military operations from receiving widespread public support, from major wars to occupations.
America’s best course of action has been demonstrated recently by President Trump: acknowledging its status as a paper tiger, and avoiding large combat operations, but executing occasional demonstrations of its military might to maintain the air of confidence.
This piece has been adapted from Professor Barton Myers’ HIST 246: The American Experience with Guerrilla Warfare and Insurgency. For a full-length version of the piece, contact the author at akagan@mail.wlu.edu.
