FEATURES: Special Commentary. Limits of Negative Peace, Faces of Positive Peace — Patricia M. Shields. A Wake for Counterinsurgency? Abandoning Counterinsurgency: Reviving Antiterrorism Strategy—Steven Metz. Insurgent Defectors in Counterinsurgencies—Jacqueline L. Hazelton. War among (& for) the People. Rethinking NATO Policy…
Counterinsurgency (COIN) continues to be a controversial subject among military leaders. Critics argue that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have made the U.S. military, particularly the Army, “COIN-centric.” They maintain that equipping U.S. forces to combat insurgency has eroded…
The author examines the perceptions of victory and failure in counterinsurgencies throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries, and compares those perceptions with the British experience in Northern Ireland and the U.S. experience in Iraq. Most importantly, the monograph addresses the…
The premise of most Western thinking on counterinsurgency is that success depends on establishing a perception of legitimacy among local populations. The path to legitimacy is often seen as the improvement of governance in the form of effective and efficient…
This monograph presents an investigation of the concept’s colonial antecedents, inception at the onset of the Cold War, subsequent U.S. interpretation during Vietnam, and modern application to post-9/11 conflict in order to elucidate its true nature—one which can only properly…
This monograph examines the U.S. Military’s struggle to find the correct balance between conventional and counterinsurgency/stability approaches. The author uses history to remind us that at the end of wars, Armies often “throw the baby out with the bathwater” and…
For decades since the formation of the defense establishment under the 1947 National Security Act, all U.S. cabinet departments, national security agencies, and military services involved in providing for the common defense have struggled to overcome differences in policy and…
In March 2006, President George W. Bush signed a new National Security Strategy that he refers to as a “wartime national security strategy” and states that to follow the path the United States has chosen, we must “maintain and expand…
The author examines the British experience in building and training indigenous police and military forces during the Malaya and Cyprus insurgencies. These two insurgencies provide a dramatic contrast to the issue of training local security forces. In Malaya, the British…
In this defense strategy and budget book, Michael O’Hanlon argues that America’s large defense budget cannot be pared realistically in the years ahead. But given the extreme demands of the Iraq mission, particularly on the U.S. Army and Marine Corps,…