Flipping the Switch: Combat, State Building, and Junior Officers in Iraq and Afghanistan

Contemporary us counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq and Afghanistan requires junior leaders to engage in both combat and state-building activities. This study aims to explain the fundamental challenge in merging these. I argue that difficulty lies in separating insurgents from civilians, and translating doctrine from senior to junior officers. Junior officers consistently develop a similar ad hoc decision-making tool role-switchingto simplify complex situations to a binary of hostile or not. They understand themselves to fill only two roles, the violent on role and the non-violent off role and develop several tools to minimize the difficulty of role-switching, help their subordinates switch, and signal switching to local populations. Ultimately, however, problems with role-switchingrole stickiness, inappropriate switching, and role biascan in some cases encourage indiscriminate and excessive violence, pointing to the fundamental failures of using military forces as a one-size-fits-all solution to state-building projects abroad.