Small Unit Leaders Guide To Counterinsurgency Five Final Rules

Field Notes On The Five Rules

I picked up a copy of the Small Unit Leaders Guide To Counterinsurgency Five Final Rules back in 2018 when I was running a platoon-sized element in a place that mostly just wanted to be left alone but kept getting dragged into someone else's war. The guide isn't flashy. It doesn't pretend to be anything more than a pocket reference for guys who have to make decisions before breakfast without much sleep. The five rules themselves are straightforward enough that you'd think anyone could internalize them overnight. They aren't. The problem isn't understanding them. The problem is remembering them when the situation starts spinning.

Small Unit Leaders Guide To Counterinsurgency Five Final Rules

Rule one is know your area and the people in it. Rule two is separate the insurgents from the population. Rule three is protect the population. Rule four is win over the local power brokers without letting them run your operation. Rule five is sustain pressure until the insurgency runs out of room to operate. That's the summary version. The actual guide expands each point with field techniques, decision trees, and scenario checklists that most leaders I've worked with skip because reading takes time they don't think they have. Here's what I learned after using this guide for about fourteen months in a rotating deployment cycle. The five rules are designed to be followed sequentially, but in practice they overlap constantly. You'll be working rule three and rule four at the same time while rule one keeps demanding attention you can't give it. That's not a flaw in the guide. That's just how the field works. The most useful section for me was the population separation framework under rule two. It gives you a scoring system to classify civilians based on their relationship to the insurgent network. Neutral, coerced, willing participant. Most leaders I've seen gloss over this and default to treating everyone as either friendly or hostile. The scoring system forces you to make a judgment call and document it, which sounds bureaucratic but actually saves you from making the wrong call when things go sideways six months later during an after-action review.

I ran into a specific problem that the guide doesn't directly address. We had a village where the insurgent element wasn't embedded in the population but was actually running a legitimate-looking water distribution NGO. The population didn't see them as insurgents. They saw them as the only reason the taps ran. The five rules assume the insurgent presence is recognizable to the civilian population at some level. When the insurgent is also the service provider, rule two's separation framework breaks down unless you adapt it. My workaround was to treat the NGO's beneficiary list as an intelligence source instead of trying to sever the connection outright. We mapped every household receiving aid, cross-referenced it with known insurgent contacts, and then used our own presence to provide competing services. It took about three weeks to establish a parallel water point that we could tie to community leadership instead of the NGO. Once that was running, the population's dependency shifted and the insurgent's influence dropped enough for rule three and rule four to start working properly. The guide doesn't cover this edge case, but the underlying logic of rule two does if you're willing to spend the time to modify it. Another thing beginners miss is the sustainability piece in rule five. It's easy to read that rule as "keep hitting them until they quit." It's not. The guide actually spends more words on what happens after you've degraded the insurgent network than on the degradation itself. Most small unit leaders I talk to focus entirely on the kinetic side and treat the sustain phase as something that happens automatically. It doesn't. If you pull out after the main insurgent element is disrupted without handing off your population protection responsibilities to a local authority that actually has legitimacy in that area, the insurgents will regenerate within sixty to ninety days. I've watched it happen twice in two different theaters.

The guide's greatest limitation is that it assumes a certain level of institutional support. The population scoring system, the power broker engagement framework, the sustain-phase handoff procedures — they all require paperwork, coordination with higher headquarters, and access to intelligence assets that not every small unit has. If you're operating with minimal staff and no liaison capability, you can still use the five rules, but you'll need to strip them down to their essence and accept that some of the supporting detail will never happen. I've done this. It works, but you lose precision. The trade-off is real and the guide doesn't apologize for it. If you don't have the institutional backing to run the full framework, consider pairing the five rules with a simpler local militia integration model. The core idea stays the same — separate, protect, persuade, sustain — but you replace the structured scoring and documentation with informal relationship mapping that your NCOs can do from memory. It's less defensible in an after-action review but more practical when you're short-staffed and short on time. The guide itself runs about forty-five pages in its standard field edition. It's widely available through military surplus channels and some defense training publishers. A lot of the content overlaps with FM 3-24 and the newer MCWP 3-33.5, so if you already have those on hand you might not need a separate physical copy. The five rules version is denser and more focused on the small unit level than the larger doctrine documents, which is why I keep recommending it for platoon and squad leaders specifically.

I'll stop here. The five rules are a starting point, not a script. They work best when you understand the logic behind them rather than treating them as checkboxes. The field will test each one differently depending on terrain, culture, and the specific insurgent group you're dealing with. The guide won't answer every question. It answers the right ones though.