The Army’s reluctant embrace of counterinsurgency and stability operations is the right choice. Now comes the hard part: to institutionalize it.

The U.S. Army and its principal client, the American people, stand at an important crossroads. Ongoing military operations in two wars have exposed the difficulties of accomplishing critical policy aims. In these conflicts, the nation has relied heavily on the Army to carry a significant portion of the national effort, and it has done so in ways that neither it nor the Army had envisioned a decade ago.