The re-emergence of counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine within the U.S. military and the apparent, if tentative, success of that doctrine thus far in Iraq and Afghanistan have given rise to an intense debate among defense scholars. One side of the debate argues that the leading proponents of COIN, the so-called ‘COIN-dinistas,’ are giving the doctrine too much credit for recent successes by misrepresenting the causes of the Anbar Awakening and the effects of the ‘Surge,’ while deliberately downplaying the role of enemy-centric measures in containing the insurgencies. The COIN-dinistas, for their part, maintain that their opponents, the so-called ‘COIN-tras,’ are simply refusing to acknowledge that the population-centric approach is effective, that it can be replicated elsewhere with appropriate adjustments for different cultures; and that, in short, the capabilities associated with COIN are the long-sought answers to the challenges posed by the ‘new’ wars of the twenty-first century. This last claim, in particular, has led to a number of complaints by defense scholars that tactics are (once again) driving U.S. strategy; or, as some have recently argued, the obsession with applying a specific military ‘grammar’ is undermining, or supplanting entirely, the ‘logic’ of employing it in the first place. Indeed, this complaint is not without merit; for the rhetoric of the COIN-dinistas suggests that the optimal grand strategy consists of stringing a series of counterinsurgency campaigns together.