<DIV>Colonel Gian Gentile’s 2008 article ?Misreading the Surge” in <I>World Politics Review</I> first exposed a growing rift among military intellectuals that has since been playing out in strategy sessions at the Pentagon, in classrooms at military academies, and on the pages of the <I>New York Times</I>. While the past years of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan have been dominated by the doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN), Gentile and a small group of dissident officers and defense analysts have questioned the necessity and efficacy of COIN—essentially armed nation-building—in achieving the United States’ limited core policy objective in Afghanistan: the destruction of Al Qaeda.<BR><BR>Drawing both on the author’s experiences as a combat battalion commander in the Iraq War and his research into the application of counterinsurgency in a variety of historical contexts, <I>Wrong Turn</I> is a brilliant summation of Gentile’s views of the failures of COIN, as well as a searing reevaluation of the current state of affairs in Afghanistan.<BR><BR>As the issue of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan inevitably rises to the top of the national agenda, <I>Wrong Turn</I> will be a major new touchstone for what went wrong and a vital new guide to the way forward.<BR><BR><I>Note: the ideas in this book are the author’s alone, not the Department of Defense’s.</I><BR></DIV>