Background
Gentile, Gian P. was born on October 9, 1957 in Walnut Creek, California, United States. Son of Armand Michael and Jacqueline Elizabeth Gentile.
Gentile, Gian P. was born on October 9, 1957 in Walnut Creek, California, United States. Son of Armand Michael and Jacqueline Elizabeth Gentile.
Gentile enlisted in the United States Army in 1975 and graduated from University of California-Berkeley"s Reserve Officers Training Corps program in 1986. He completed a Doctor of Philosophy in history at Stanford University in 2000.
Gentile has also been a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior historian at the Research and Development Corporation. He is a leading critic of United States. military counter-insurgency doctrine. He served two tours in Iraq, first as the executive officer of a combat brigade in Tikrit in 2003 and then as a squadron commander in western Baghdad in 2006.
Gentile is a prominent critic of the United States. military"s use of counter-insurgency.
He believes that the 2007 surge was not the primary cause of the reduction in violence in Iraq and that effective counter-insurgency tactics were practiced by American troops in Iraq starting in 2004, rather than being introduced in 2007. He further argues that the United States. military is now concentrating excessively on counter-insurgency, to the detriment of its capacity to fight conventional wars.
Following Andrew Bacevich, Gentile believes that the prominence of counterinsurgency has led to an unrealistic view of the American military"s power and capacity to change the world.
Member of Society Military History (moncado award 2002).
Married GeeWon Kim, November 9, 1979. Children: Armand Michael, Elizabeth Anne.