I am currently at Fort Sill Oklahoma attending a course called BOLC (Basic Officer Leadership) II. Before I get into that, I wanted to mention an awesome book discussion I went to a week and a half ago. It was on the book Accidental Guerilla, written by David Kilcullen. Dr. Kilcullen was GEN Petraeus’ senior counter-insurgency (COIN) advisor during the surge and is widely regarded as the leading and most influential COIN expert. 

His book accidental guerilla basically argues that only about 5-10% of the people in modern insurgencies are diehards who have offensive reasons for fighting and will attack us no matter what. The vast majority are what he terms in his ruefully Australian manner “accidental guerillas.” They fight because of situational factors. Those include, but are not limited to, lack of security, us killing a relative, economic incentives, mistrust of us, culture of honor, and intimidation. He argues that if we focus on shaping the environment more than killing the insurgents we can convince these accidental guerilla to give up.

The book discussion was awesome. It was very interesting and I met a lot of interesting people including the author as you can see in the attached picture. I also met two other of my heroes. John Nagl, who recently retired from the US military and is our most influential COIN expert, and COL HR McMaster, a prominent academic and combat commander who waged a successful COIN fight in Tal Alfar, making him one of the first commanders other than Petraeus to do so.

On Saturday, I left for BOLC II here in Fort Sill. BOLC was created because they found most junior officers not in the Infantry did not know how to conduct convoys in humvees and did not know what to do when they got hit. So far it is not that great. We have been doing mostly admin stuff. I have heard from my friends that once we do get to the training part it is not the great either, but we’ll see. They give us more personal freedoms than other courses I have been to and we get weekends off. I have attached a picture of my barracks room which I share with two others. It is pretty typical for training course barracks but you would only get stuck in something like this at your actual unit if you were really unlucky. I have also attached a picture from the most fun training we have done so far, carry relays.