Author Description

In the summer and fall of 2009, General Stanley McChrystal and his small operational planning team went through an exhaustive “troop-to-task” analysis to determine the right force increase to properly resource his newly recommended “protect-the-population” counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy. Informed by the operational planning team (OPT), General McChrystal recommended to the president that approximately 43,000 new forces be sent to Afghanistan.This narrative focuses on the process that US Army general Stanley McChrystal’s operational planning team went through as it conducted its research and analysis of a variety of counterinsurgency theories applied to the difficult operating environment in Afghanistan.