Gian P. Gentile

Bio: Gian P. Gentile is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Strategic bombing & Doctrine. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 6 publications receiving 211 citations.

A Strategy of Tactics: Population-centric COIN and the Army

Abstract: Population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) has become the American Army’s new way of war. The principles and ideas that emerged out of the Army’s counterinsurgency field manual (FM), FM 3-24, published in late 2006, have become transcendent. The field manual has moved beyond simple Army doctrine for countering insurgencies to become the defining characteristic of the Army’s new way of war. In the American Army today, everyone is a counterinsurgent. It is easy to find examples of FM 3-24’s permeating effect in other Army doctrinal manuals such as FM 3-0, Operations, and FM 3-07, Stability Operations. Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell, IV, the American Army general charged with writing the Army’s doctrine, recently stated:

Wrong Turn: America s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency

Abstract: While US war strategies have been dominated by the doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN), Col Gian Gentile and a group of dissident officers and defence analysts have questioned the efficacy of COIN - essentially armed nation-building Drawing on Col Gentile's experiences as a combat battalion commander in Iraq and his research into the application of counterinsurgency in a variety of historical contexts, Wrong Turn is a brilliant summation of Gentile's views of the failures of COIN, as well as a searing re-evaluation of the current state of affairs in Afghanistan

How Effective is Strategic Bombing?: Lessons Learned From World War II to Kosovo

Abstract: In the wake of World War II, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and President Harry S. Truman established the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, to determine exactly how effectively strategic air power had been applied in the European theater and in the Pacific. The final study, consisting of over 330 separate reports and annexes, was staggering in its size and emphatic in its conclusions. As such it has for decades been used as an objective primary source and a guiding text, a veritable Bible for historians of air power. In this aggressively revisionist volume, Gian Gentile examines afresh this influential document to reveal how it reflected to its very foundation the American conceptual approach to strategic bombing. In the process, he exposes the survey as largely tautological and thereby throwing into question many of the central tenets of American air power philosophy and strategy. With a detailed chapter on the Gulf War and the resulting Gulf War Air Power Survey, and a concluding chapter on the lessons of the Kosovo air war, How Effective is Strategic Bombing? is the most comprehensive and important book on air power strategy in decades.

Advocacy or Assessment? The United States Strategic Bombing Survey of Germany and Japan

Abstract: Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. USSBS, Summary Report (Pacific War) (1946)

The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945

Abstract: Why have nuclear weapons not been used since Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945? Nina Tannenwald disputes the conventional answer of 'deterrence' in favour of what she calls a nuclear taboo - a widespread inhibition on using nuclear weapons - which has arisen in global politics. Drawing on newly released archival sources, Tannenwald traces the rise of the nuclear taboo, the forces that produced it, and its influence, particularly on US leaders. She analyzes four critical instances where US leaders considered using nuclear weapons (Japan 1945, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Gulf War 1991) and examines how the nuclear taboo has repeatedly dissuaded US and other world leaders from resorting to these 'ultimate weapons'. Through a systematic analysis, Tannenwald challenges conventional conceptions of deterrence and offers a compelling argument on the moral bases of nuclear restraint as well as an important insight into how nuclear war can be avoided in the future.

The Computer in the Garbage Can: Air-Defense Systems in the Organization of US Nuclear Command and Control, 1940-1960

Abstract: During the late 1950s, the United States Air Force initiated development on nearly twodozen military “command and control systems.” What they shared in common was a novel application of digital electronics to the problem of nuclear warfare. Most of these systems descended, in some fashion, from a program called “SAGE,” the Semiautomatic Ground Environment, which gathered data from a network of radar stations for processing at large Air Defense Direction Centers, where digital computers assisted human operators in tracking, identifying, and, potentially, intercepting and destroying hostile aircraft. Although histories of SAGE have been written before, they have tended to stress digital computing as a rationalist response to the threat of mass raids by nuclear-armed Soviet bombers. Nevertheless, organizational sociology suggests that large bureaucratic organizations, such as the United States Air Force, often defy our intuition that decisions, technological or otherwise, must follow a perceived problem to its potential solution. According to the so-called “garbage-can model of organizational choice,” problems and solutions may, in certain circumstances, arise independently and join together unpredictably, because the basic social phenomena do not conform to bureaucratic ideals. This dissertation argues that SAGE, and indeed, the entire ColdWar project of nuclearand-command, can be understood as a sequence of “garbage-can-like” decisions, resulting in a conglomeration of independent systems whose behavior appeared reasonable from the perspective of the using organization, but which nonetheless failed to cohere against the far greater danger of a global thermonuclear exchange. They did, however, succeed at satisfying the government’s need to act by projecting uncomfortable questions of political organization onto popular technology programs.

The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present

Abstract: Latin had no word for "strategy", but the East Romans, whom we call the Byzantines, did. This book tracks the evolution of the concept of warfare being subjected to higher political aims from Antiquity to the Present, using Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, English and German sources. It tracks the rise, fall, and resurrection of the belief in the Roman and later the medieval and early modern world that warfare was only legitimate if it pursued the higher goal of a just peace, which in the 19th century gave way to a blinkered concentration on military victory as only war aim. It explains why one school of thought, from Antiquity to the present, emphasised eternal principles of warfare, while others emphasised, in Clausewitz's term, the "changing character of war". It tracks ideas from land warfare to naval warfare to air power and nuclear thinking, but it also stresses great leaps and discontinuities in thinking about strategy. It covers asymmetric wars both from the point of view of the weaker power seeking to overthrow a stronger power, and from the stronger power dealing with insurgents and other numerically inferior forces. It concludes with a commentary of the long-known problems of bureaucratic politics, non-centralised command and inter-service rivalry, which since the 16th century or earlier has created obstacles to coherent strategy making.

A Strategy of Tactics: Population-centric COIN and the Army

Abstract: Population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) has become the American Army’s new way of war. The principles and ideas that emerged out of the Army’s counterinsurgency field manual (FM), FM 3-24, published in late 2006, have become transcendent. The field manual has moved beyond simple Army doctrine for countering insurgencies to become the defining characteristic of the Army’s new way of war. In the American Army today, everyone is a counterinsurgent. It is easy to find examples of FM 3-24’s permeating effect in other Army doctrinal manuals such as FM 3-0, Operations, and FM 3-07, Stability Operations. Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell, IV, the American Army general charged with writing the Army’s doctrine, recently stated: