1.The insurgency in Iraq following the clean classic victory for the US and UK forces prompted a re-think on US doctrine. The tendency is away from the tactical-technical-organisational line in Trinquier, Galula, and 1980s US doctrine on Low Intensity Conflict. The US Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual FM 3-07.22 (interim) of 1 October 2004 is already quite close to the new draft document. The 2006 draft of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which has become operational on 1 October 2006, by contrast, devotes little more than 10 per cent to such technicalities.
2.Strategies in the Cold War, especially nuclear strategies, are functions of the ideologies, national cultures and beliefs of those who formulated them, and in no way sought to understand the adversary’s military thinking in order to tailor one’s own posture and capabilities to his psychological weaknesses.  This was criticised by a few, but brushed aside as hardly relevant by the “victors” of the Cold War. The Yugoslav Wars of Secession gave new prominence to the opinion of experts in human personality and culture which social scientists had never ceased to ponder. 
3.What is needed is the recruitment of more civilian regional experts and specialised social/cultural anthropologists as advisers of officers in all leading positions of a counterinsurgency, provided the latter show as much openness to their advice as Generals Petraeus and Mattis have shown to Dr McFate. 
4.But nothing hedged against the danger that, like in Vietnam, a dramatic publicity defeat, followed by the resignation of the top political leadership, will cut off the legs from under even the most successful and sophisticated COIN operations, such as, in Vietnam, the Civil Operations and Revolutionary/Rural Development Support, or the Combined Acton Program.