In today’s Wall Street Journal, Yochi Dreazen airs the views of Lieutenant Colonel Gian Gentile, an Iraq War veteran now teaching at West Point. Gentile opposes the surge–and thinks the army is making a mistake by preparing for counterinsurgency warfare at the risk of diminishing its conventional combat capabilities. As Gentile makes clear in this essay, he doesn’t think that U.S. forces have gotten any better at counterinsurgency since he commanded a battalion in Baghdad in 2006. The only difference between now and then, he argues, is that we paid off the insurgents not to fight.

Colonel Peter Mansoor, General Petraeus’s executive officer (who is retiring soon to become a professor of military history at Ohio State University), demolishes Gentile’s arguments in the Small Wars Journal. As Mansoor points out:

Gentile’s battalion occupied Ameriyah, which in 2006 was an Al Qaeda safe-haven infested by Sunni insurgents and their Al Qaeda-Iraq allies. I’m certain that he and his soldiers did their best to combat these enemies and to protect the people in their area. But since his battalion lived at Forward Operating Base Falcon and commuted to the neighborhood, they could not accomplish their mission. The soldiers did not fail. The strategy did.

I side with Mansoor in this debate, much as it pains me to disagree with Gentile, a fellow U.C. Berkeley graduate. But I am glad that Gentile is able to express a contrary viewpoint while remaining an officer in good standing. The U.S. Army has a reputation for conformity that is to some extent well-deserved. Obviously you need a “yes, sir” ethos to command forces in battle. But you also need a lively intellectual discourse—the willingness to say “no, sir, you’re wrong” in order to figure out how to prepare for battle. There is no doubt that, as many soldiers themselves say, the army can do better in this department. But as demonstrated by the Mansoor-Gentile debate—and a hundred other doctrinal disputes which are never written up in the Wall Street Journal—there is a greater degree of spirited debate and tolerance for competing viewpoints within the army than on many of our major college campuses.