It is a huge pleasure for me to be back at Fort Benning. My last visit here was more than 20 years ago, during the hot summer of 1986, when Sergeant Airborne pinned silver wings to my bony chest with a vigor that would today result in a court ...Read more >

Leading up to the Presidential Inauguration, the use of military Soft Power has been roundly debated as military policy evolves under the new administration. The conventional thought process on how and why militaries conduct soft power operations, non-traditional missions involving humanitarian assistance, disaster ...Read more >

Warfare blogs, Department of Defense forums, and defense industry conferences have debated terms surrounding the current global conflict. This clash has a myriad descriptive names such as The Global War on Terrorism, The Long War, and Overseas Contingency Operation. Similarly, defense pundits have wrestled with the terms, asymmetric warfare, irregular warfare, and terrorism. Another definition that must be reviewed is ...Read more >

Hearts and Minds is a wonderful name for a teen romance novel, but Ive always thought it to be a poor name for a counterinsurgency concept. The idea of winning the hearts and minds of the population carries the connotation that there is somehow a magic formula that will turn the population from willing puppets of the insurgency into enthusiastic supporters of the national ...Read more >

Every twenty years or so, our Army has a furious internal debate over what kind of army it wants to be. We are not talking about an argument over civilian driven social experimentation such as the controversy over gays in the military; this one involves basic disagreement on how Americas Army should doctrinally ...Read more >

At last weeks SAIS/Texas Tech conference Lessons Learned, Lessons Lost: Counterinsurgency from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, the final panel assessed which lessons of the past have been applied or should be applied, and which have been disregarded or should be ...Read more >

While Henry Kissinger encouraged President Bush to read Alistair Hornes seminal study of the Algerian War of Independence, A Savage War of Peace, during the debate on the troop surge to Iraq, this conflict remains largely ignored as a source of inspiration for the conduct of counterinsurgency operations in the Middle East and Southwest ...Read more >

Terrorism is a threat to the stability and national security of many countries, and has undermined countless governments. However, technological improvements within the last century have allowed greater, more spectacular attacks and broadened the means by which terrorists may broadcast their ...Read more >

The recent release by WikiLeaks.org of over seventy thousand classified U.S. Military documents pertaining to the insurgency in Afghanistan has generated immense media and public interest and is being compared in scale to the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1965 by Daniel ...Read more >

According to Clausewitz, war is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to do our will1. War has a unique nature but several faces, which are usually categorized in the form of an adjectivethus, war or warfare can be described as just, necessary, regular, irregular, interstate, asymmetric, civil, humanitarian, extermination, total, limited, nuclear, conventional, movement, electronic, ...Read more >

As a reaction to the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded Afghanistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and to destroy his organization. The pursuit of bin Laden and Al Qaeda soon became a battle against the Taliban and as time passed the original mission receded into the ...Read more >

An invading foreign force, on completion of its objectives i.e. regime change through violent means or having inflicted sufficient losses to a targeted group, should not prolong its stay and assume the role of occupiers. This tendency infuriates local passion built on independent beliefs, cultural biases, religious differences and historic ...Read more >

GEN Petraeus. COIN Guidance is published and on the bulletin boards in hundreds of staff offices in Kabul. As the vanguard of this new policy, Afghan Hands have a charter to operate under the COIN Guidance in concert with the mission statement developed for the ...Read more >

Clausewitz describes war in a foreign policy context that needs to be adapted to insurgencies. This paper discusses insurgency in the context of domestic rather than foreign policy. It discusses the aspects of domestic politics that help define the role of violent coercion in domestic political ...Read more >

Contemporary discourse on counterinsurgency is voluminous and often contentious, but to date there has been a dearth of systematic evidence supporting the various counterinsurgency (COIN) approaches advocated by various discussants. This analysis is based on all insurgencies worldwide begun and concluded between 1978 and 2008; 30 insurgencies in ...Read more >