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The book that most changed my career path was “The Army and Vietnam” by Andrew Krepinevich. Krepinevich’s book fundamentally altered the approach I took as a company commander during my second Iraq tour in 2006.

When I returned to Germany in 2004, fresh from my first 15-month tour in Iraq, I was convinced there had to be a better way to fight this kind of conflict. A year of operations in Baghdad and three months fighting the first Sadr rebellion made it clear to me that our strategies and methods were inadequate to meet the demands of the environment. As a new company commander, I had an obligation to become as educated as possible on counterinsurgency. Unfortunately, I didn’t know where to begin. As an armor officer, my professional military education to this point included great detail on how to fight at the National Training Center or in the Fulda gap but contained absolutely nothing on counterinsurgency.

I proceeded to the bookshelves of the small library in Friedberg, Germany, where I was stationed. Looking down the military history and theory aisle, I spotted a worn black book with a Huey helicopter depicted on the front. It was titled, somewhat generically, “The Army and Vietnam.” The dust jacket discussed how the Army had failed to adapt to the environment in Vietnam. Knowing Vietnam was our last fight against an insurgency, albeit in a very different context, I checked out the book — the first time anyone had done so since 1991.

I have read few books in my life where reading the contents angered me. I found myself angry not at Krepinevich’s words, but because it often seemed I could simply strike “Vietnam” in the text and replace it with “Iraq” and the narrative would have been the same. Like the Army in Vietnam, we focused on large-scale operations to shape our area, believing that if we killed or captured all the enemy in our sector, we could go home. We failed to realize the fight was for the loyalty of the population, which we had placed secondary to engaging the enemy in battle. For example, as I left Iraq in 2004, we were leaving bases close to the population, the opposite of what was successful in counterinsurgency practice. I was irate because I couldn’t believe that my superior officers, graduates of institutions such as the School for Advanced Military Studies at the Command and General Staff College, Army War College and similar institutions would make the same basic mistakes the Army made 40 years ago and repeat them to a fault during the early years of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I now know that the Army, either through action or neglect, purged itself of those hard-won lessons between 1973 and 2003. Likewise, we remained institutionally ignorant of the hard lessons the French and British learned in their own small wars. As a result, we squandered our first year in Iraq, conducting counterproductive operations that were at odds with historically successful counterinsurgency principles.

I resolved to think and act differently with my company when I arrived in Iraq in January 2006 at a small town named Tal Afar, a dusty agrarian region that 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment successfully cleared to much fanfare. Col. H.R. McMaster arrayed his forces into numerous small outposts to protect the populace and deny the enemy freedom of movement. Although McMaster’s troopers had quelled the worst of the insurgency and spread through the city, significant pockets of insurgent activity remained, conducting attacks against security forces and the population.

I fell on this distributed footprint and began applying what I recently learned. I established a platoon-sized base in the Sa’ad neighborhood of northern Tal Afar. Sa’ad stubbornly harbored insurgent activity. The neighborhood was a wreck and 70 percent empty as a result of heavy fighting by previous units. Our basic goal was to live as close to the people as possible, establish security and use classic counterinsurgency methods to flush out insurgents. My platoons, led by motivated young platoon leaders and seasoned noncommissioned officers, rotated through our outpost, living with the people, enduring attacks by car bombs, improvised explosive devices and direct-fire attacks. Eventually, we brought locally recruited Iraqi police to the neighborhood, established population-control measures, elected local leaders and managed to transform the neighborhood from one of the most dangerous to one of the safest in Tal Afar. The path Krepinevich had set me on produced concrete results that were held as a model for other areas of Iraq.

Since returning from Iraq, I have studied other writers on counterinsurgency, such as Galula, Trinquier, Kilcullen, Kitson, McCuen and Thompson; however, Krepinevich’s work was my first entry into the world of counterinsurgency theory and application in the real world. It profoundly changed my mind-set as a company commander, altering the lens through which I viewed the conflict and the tactical actions required to win. I am still disturbed that I had to learn these lessons randomly in the base library and not as part of formal education as a leader, a fault not fully rectified in our formal professional military education system to this day. Although the operational force has adapted to the environment and updated its training, counterinsurgency is still not a fully integrated part of our education curriculum. Unless we balance our military educational systems by mandating some form of counterinsurgency education at all levels, we risk losing our hard-won knowledge as surely as we did following Vietnam, forcing another generation to take unnecessary casualties because of professional ignorance of a critical spectrum of warfare.