New Administration's Counterinsurgency Guide?

In a ceremony yesterday in Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Robert Gates, and USAID Administrator Henrietta Fore signed off on the U. S. government's new Interagency Counterinsurgency Guide -- a handbook for policymakers that is supposed to reassert the primacy of "soft power."
Put differently: if the famous FM 3-24, the Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual, was supposed to turn the military on to irregular warfare, now it's the diplomats' (and USAID's, and everyone else's) turn.
This is significant for a number of reasons. Number one, the guide is being signed at the highest level, lending weight to a document that is supposed to distil the principles of counterinsurgency doctrine, as well as the lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan. And the guide was complete in time for the new administration -- which, by the looks of it, will be seeded with counterinsurgency advocates like Michele Flournoy, recently tapped as the Pentagon's policy chief.
Counterinsurgency -- at least according to theories that are back in vogue -- is primarily a political strategy, not a military effort. This manual is part of a belated effort to get the rest of government involved (instead of the uniformed military, which has been doing all the heavy lifting).
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/01/a-counterinsurg.html

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