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).

Australian counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen was a driving force behind this new document. FM 3-24 often reads more like a guide to 20th century Maoist-style insurgencies; Kilcullen led a series of drafting sessions to produce a document that took a more contemporary view of the problem.

Not everyone, of course, is a true believer when it comes to counterinsurgency. Col. Gian Gentile, for one, thinks the military is in the grip of a new orthodoxy. In an excellent web-only story for Foreign Policy, he argues:

This narrow approach – known in the current military vernacular as clear, hold, and build – dominates the Army so much that it permeates the service's professional journals. Now, whenever a problem of instability or insurgency presents itself, it's the only approach that seems to be considered, yet different situations might call for different methods. In this sense, the Army has become dogmatic.

Now that the "whole-of-government" counterinsurgency doctrine is done and dusted, it will be interesting to see how this debate continues.

[PHOTO: U.S. Army]

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