History/developing/Apr 22, 2026Open in Obsidian ↗
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Counterinsurgent Literacy Advantage — Why Documentation Determines Doctrine

The Knowledge That Keeps Getting Lost

Boot's Chapter 12 ("War by the Book") makes an argument that is almost too obvious to notice — and has been almost entirely ignored by military institutional practice. The argument: states that systematically document, preserve, and transmit their irregular warfare knowledge across generations outperform states that rely on individual practitioners regenerating the same knowledge from experience in each conflict.

The "literacy advantage" is not about intelligence or capability. It is about institutional memory. Every major power has produced soldiers and commanders who learned, through bitter experience, what works and what doesn't in counterinsurgency. Almost every major power has then failed to preserve that knowledge in forms that survived the end of the specific conflict. The next war started with a fresh generation of commanders who had to relearn the same lessons at the cost of the same blood.1

The Documentation Failure Cycle

Boot documents a repeating four-stage cycle across every major counterinsurgency power:

Stage 1 — Experience: A conflict generates soldiers and commanders who develop practical knowledge of what works in irregular warfare through direct experience.

Stage 2 — Partial capture: Some fraction of this knowledge gets written down — field manuals, after-action reports, memoirs, tactical notes. Rogers's "28 Rules" is the clearest early American example; the French Instruction sur la guerre des partisans (1760); British "Small Wars" manuals from the colonial era.

Stage 3 — Institutional rejection: The military institution, whose organizational culture and career advancement structures are built around conventional warfare, systematically deprioritizes the captured irregular warfare knowledge. Officers who specialize in counterinsurgency find their career advancement slower than those who specialize in conventional operations. The doctrine gets shelved.

Stage 4 — Loss: When the next irregular war arrives, the previous doctrine is not in active use, its practitioners have retired or died, and their successors must regenerate the knowledge from scratch.1

The Evidence

Boot traces this cycle repeatedly:

British Colonial COIN: The British Army developed sophisticated irregular warfare doctrine through a century of colonial campaigns — the "Small Wars" literature, Callwell's Small Wars (1896), Gwynn's Imperial Policing (1934). This knowledge was partially applied in Malaya (1948–1960) with success. It was not adequately transmitted to the next generation — the British Army's COIN capacity in Northern Ireland (1969–) initially showed the same conventional-army limitations.

French in Algeria: French Army officers developed the doctrine de guerre révolutionnaire from their Algeria experience — arguably the most sophisticated counterinsurgency doctrine produced in the 20th century. When the Algeria war ended (1962) amid political crisis, the officers who held the doctrine were expelled from the army during the OAS mutiny. The doctrine walked out the door with them.

American Vietnam to Iraq: The US Army fought the Vietnam counterinsurgency with substantial doctrinal development by the war's midpoint — the CORDS program, the Phoenix Program's intelligence-driven targeting, Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support. After Vietnam, the Army systematically purged counterinsurgency from its curriculum and doctrine, focusing entirely on the NATO-Warsaw Pact scenario. When Iraq arrived in 2003, the Army had essentially no institutional COIN doctrine — FM 3-24 had to be written in 2006 essentially from scratch, rediscovering what had been known in 1968.1

What Successful Documentation Looks Like

Boot's positive examples of documentation advantage:

Rogers's Rangers (1757): The "28 Rules of Ranging" created a written document that could be read and followed by officers who had never personally fought in North American forest terrain. The document outlasted Rogers himself and shaped American irregular warfare tradition across generations.

British "Small Wars" literature: Callwell's Small Wars (1896) was read and used by British officers across colonial campaigns. Imperfect and Eurocentric, but it meant the British Army did not start from zero in each new irregular campaign. There was an institutional reference point.

FM 3-24 (2006): The Petraeus-era field manual is the most recent example of successful capture — comprehensive, theoretically grounded, and explicitly designed to survive the current conflict. Whether it survives institutional peace-time deprioritization remains to be seen.1

Why Institutions Don't Preserve This Knowledge

The institutional failure is structural, not accidental:

Career incentives: Promotion in military organizations is based on command performance in exercises and conventional operations. An officer who specializes in counterinsurgency — who develops language skills, cultural expertise, and governance capacity — is not advancing in the skills the promotion system rewards. The institutional signal is clear: specialize in conventional warfare.

Equipment procurement: Defense budget allocation follows doctrine priority. When counterinsurgency is deprioritized, procurement shifts to conventional platforms. The shift is self-reinforcing: once the procurement baseline is conventional, the institutional momentum of sunk costs makes the shift back to counterinsurgency investment difficult.

Cultural prestige: Military culture across every major power treats decisive battle as the honorable form of warfare. Counterinsurgency — patient, ambiguous, governance-focused, often without clear "winning" — lacks the cultural prestige that drives institutional investment. The officers who want to be Patton don't want to be advised on village governance.

Tensions

Documentation vs. adaptation: Documented doctrine can become a trap. If Rogers's Rangers had been applied by rote in the Civil War without adaptation to different terrain and different opponents, the doctrine would have been harmful rather than helpful. Documentation preserves knowledge; it can also freeze it. The literacy advantage requires not just documentation but a culture of critical engagement with the doctrine — which is harder to institutionalize than the documentation itself.

The classification problem: Much actual irregular warfare knowledge is classified and therefore inaccessible to the institutional learning system. After-action reports from special operations are classified; tactical lessons from drone campaign targeting are classified; signals intelligence processing methods are classified. The institutional knowledge that exists, exists in ways that prevent its systematic integration into open doctrine.

Cross-Domain Handshakes

Kata Transmission Technology (Eastern-Spirituality): Kata as Transmission Technology — Japanese martial kata solved a version of the same problem Rogers's "28 Rules" solved: how to preserve tacit fighting knowledge in an explicit form that could be transmitted to practitioners who hadn't experienced the original combat context. The kata encodes combat principles in movement sequences that can be replicated and studied. The military doctrine document encodes tactical principles in written form that can be replicated and studied. Both are solutions to the same institutional preservation problem. The kata's limitation (requires physical enactment to unlock tacit knowledge) parallels the field manual's limitation (requires combat experience to unlock the tacit knowledge the written rules represent).

Ryu Transmission Lineage System (History): Ryu — Japan's Knowledge Transmission Machine — The ryu's two-phase vitality/formalism cycle (vital necessity → Tokugawa formalist decay) is a Japanese institutional analog to Boot's documentation failure cycle. Both describe organizations that successfully preserve knowledge in written form but then lose the ability to apply it because the institutional context that made the knowledge vital has changed. The ryu's musha-shugyo anti-stagnation mechanism (deliberate challenge across schools) is structurally analogous to the war-game/exercise system military organizations use to keep doctrine current — imperfect solutions to the same problem.

The Live Edge

The Sharpest Implication The documentation failure cycle is not a mystery — it is the predictable output of military institutional incentive structures. Fixing it is not a knowledge problem but an institutional design problem. If the US Army wanted to preserve COIN knowledge across peace-time cycles, it would need to: (1) make irregular warfare expertise a career advancement asset rather than a specialization trap; (2) create doctrine development programs that are not dependent on active-conflict urgency; (3) build exercise and war-gaming programs that apply and test COIN doctrine when no war is happening. None of these are technically difficult. All of them run against institutional culture. This is why the same lessons keep being learned at the same cost.

Generative Questions

  • Is there an institutional design for a military organization that successfully preserves COIN knowledge across peacetime cycles without losing conventional warfare capability? Or is the tension between conventional and irregular warfare expertise genuinely irresolvable within a single institution — suggesting specialized COIN organizations that persist independently of conventional force cycles?

Connected Concepts

Footnotes