The Army and Counter-Insurgency

This article from Tech Central Station says the US Army historically has been pretty good in counter-insurgency, but the public has not:

the United States military has had great success fighting small wars. The Army has a long history of doing so, from the French and Indian War to the War for Independence to the Indian Wars to the Spanish-American War to Vietnam to Afghanistan. The Marines have made it their specialty. Even in Vietnam, which was both the longest war in our history and the biggest loss, the military did an excellent job of adapting to an enemy that fluctuated between conventional and guerrilla tactics. The Army's Green Berets and the Navy SEALs were specialists at this type of warfare, but the conventional Army and Marines fought it well, too...

The problem in Vietnam and Iraq is not so much that the U.S. military is bad at counterinsurgency but that insurgencies are incredibly hard to defeat.

Read the whole thing.