Abstract
How the Pentagon sent the army to Iraq
In 1964, the old Asia hand Lucian Pye astutely noted that, despite a long and well-documented history of insurgent warfare in the world, governments that have faced insurgencies–or were once insurgents themselves–tend to be quick at forgetting their roots. For militaries, this loss of memory has not been passive, but rather reflects a conscious effort to marginalize insurgency studies. “They fail to acknowledge and codify their accumulative understanding of how to cope with insurrections,” Pye lamented. “Thus each outbreak of insurgency seems to call for relearning old lessons.” 1
Yet they rarely do. And nowhere is this more true than in the United States. Scholars and soldiers alike have often used the phrase “the American way of war” to describe not just a predilection, but a virtual strategic obsession, which holds that wars are fought by gathering the maximum in manpower and materiel, hurling them into the maelstrom, and counting on swift, crushing victory. While this approach may work against a conventional army, it's nothing short of disastrous when fighting insurgents engaging in unconventional guerrilla warfare. Thus far in Iraq, the U.S. effort, though not entirely devoid of successes, has been hallmarked by overwhelmed and underprepared troops effecting heavy-handed, large-scale roundups of civilians (in some cases errantly or overzealously harming them); or the destruction of large swaths of cities and towns. Meanwhile, cycles of insurgent attacks continue to effectively target current and newly recruited Iraqi police, soldiers, and politicians, as well as Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers.
U.S. ground forces are only now beginning to readjust their approach toward counterinsurgency warfare. But to many knowledgeable observers, it's looking like too little, too late–thanks largely to the Pentagon's myopic leadership. It isn't just that the Pentagon's civilian ideologues and acquiescent brass failed to entertain even the possibility of an insurgency. And it's not merely because the civilian leadership has demonstrated a profound and deadly ignorance of insurgency's historical lessons.
It's also because, despite a plethora of writing from soldier-scholars and the informal attempts at innovation by a handful of junior officers, no formal organizational strategy exists that allows the army to rapidly and effectively adapt. All counterinsurgency scholars agree the viability of any counterinsurgency endeavor, especially one undertaken by an occupying force, depends upon this capability. Yet, until recently, even the army field manual on counterinsurgency reflected the prevailing culture of selective amnesia. The manual, published in October 2004, defines insurgency as an “organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government”–a definition that, literally applied, excluded the conflict in Iraq prior to the national elections earlier this year. 2
U.S. soldiers on the ground would probably beg to differ.
The vision thing
How is it that the U.S. Army is bereft of a counterinsurgency doctrine and, therefore, struggling to effectively counter Iraqi insurgents? A lot of it has to do with how the Bush administration's military leadership conceives of “modern war.”
In Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, the theory of modern war is enshrined in documents with titles like Joint Vision 2010 and Joint Vision 2020. These focus primarily on command and control systems heavily defined by technology and used to fight the kind of maneuver warfare that twice dispensed with Iraq's vastly inferior conventional army. “In the ideal world of JV 2020, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems like imagery satellites would gather data that troops need to ‘see’ areas of operations,” the veteran army officer and intelligence specialist John Gentry wrote in 2002, illustrating the idealized Rumsfeldian future of battlespace. “Communications networks would instantly transmit information and orders to troops, who would promptly convert them into effective action. Precision munitions would rain on targets. Victory would be assured.” 3
Gentry described this vision as a “fairy tale,” and to a large extent events have echoed his view. The success of taking out the Ba'athist army and regime had less to do with technology and more to do with the sorry skill set of Saddam's army. 4 And while some new systems did aid senior officers in their headquarters, in the field a number of systems actually imperiled frontline units: On April 3, 2003, for example, hightech systems designed to gather and send intelligence failed, and U.S. Third Infantry Division troops found themselves caught unawares by the largest Iraqi Army counterattack during major combat operations. What saved the day was quick tactical thinking by U.S. commanders on the ground. 5
But to some, even the Third Infantry Division's actions that day fall short of what current warfare is really about. In their view, technological advances that serve to enhance combat operations–or require battalion commanders to innovate their way out of being undermined by them–are merely a prologue to the actual modern war: occupying and pacifying a country in transition. It was not without good reason, for example, that 43 years ago, Col. Roger Trinquier, one of France's most insightful and controversial practitioners of unconventional warfare, titled his influential treatise Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency. Drawing on his experiences in pre-World War II colonial paramilitary operations against smugglers and pirates in Asia and the ultimately disastrous French experiences in Indochina and Algeria, Trinquier decreed the era of set-piece battles essentially obsolete. “Warfare,” he wrote, “is now an interlocking system of actions–political, economic, psychological, military–that aims at the overthrow of the established authority in a country and its replacement.” 6
Astutely summing up an almost universal resistance in military culture to the reconsideration of anything, Trinquier observed that “combat operations carried out against opposing armed forces are only of limited importance and are never the total conflict.” It was becoming increasingly likely, he wrote, for a conventional force to win all its battles, yet lose the war. “This is doubtless why the army, traditionally attracted by the purely military aspect of a conflict, has never seriously approached the study of a problem it considers an inferior element in the art of war,” he noted. “We still persist in studying a type of warfare that no longer exists and we shall never fight again…. The army is not prepared to confront an adversary employing arms and methods the army itself ignores. It has, therefore, no chance of winning.”
While Trinquier was perhaps hasty in writing the epitaph for conventional war, he was nothing short of prophetic in describing the future experiences of the Americans in Vietnam and Somalia, the British in South Yemen, the Vietnamese in Cambodia, the Israelis in Lebanon, the Ethiopians in Eritrea, the Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya (and, to a lesser and more unique extent, the Uruguayan government against the Tupamoros and, in Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza's National Guard against the Sandinistas). And since then, Trinquier has hardly been alone in casting insurgency as the true future of conflict. As the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld presciently argued in his landmark 1991 book The Transformation of War, not only does the nuclear sword-of-Damocles deter conventional war between nations (lest the conventional conflict escalate), but it also creates an incentive for those inclined to make war unconventionally, embracing the asymmetry of guerrilla and terrorist operations that U.S. military reformers term “fourth-generation warfare.” 7
The writing's on the wall: A U.S. Marine conducting a street patrol in Falluja (above); the aftermath of a car bomb outside a police station in Basra (left).
As the Cold War ended, some in military circles began to hone in on the obvious shortcomings of contemporary strategic thinking–in part because they didn't see U.S. counterinsurgency aid in El Salvador as the “success” many right-wing ideologues did. “Our military school system must teach and study small wars,” wrote one former U.S. military adviser to the Salvadoran military in a 1991 Marine Command and Staff College paper. “The ‘business as usual’ approach to small wars, as in El Salvador, leads to incoherent incremental Band-Aid fixes … we should stop experimenting with our advisors' lives and the lives of the indigent citizens.” 8
Throughout the 1990s, both students and professors at the military's war colleges produced a number of papers and studies making the case that insurgent scenarios were likely to become preeminent in the near future, and that the military couldn't afford to continue ignoring the study of counterinsurgency. Among the early and most articulate of these was Steven Metz, an Army War College professor whose respective 1993 and 1995 papers “The Future of Insurgency” and “Counterinsurgency: Strategy and the Phoenix of American Capability” both cautioned against the continued redheaded stepchild status of the field in military studies and outlined practical progressive reforms. In his 1995 study, he wrote that the U.S. military had to be “both looking backward at previous attempts to reconstitute counterinsurgency capabilities and looking forward to speculate on future forms of insurgency and the strategic environment in which counterinsurgency might occur. To do this now will shorten the period of learning and adaptation should counterinsurgency support again become an important part of American national security strategy.”
It all came to naught.
See no evil
A constant throughout all counterinsurgency literature is the importance of understanding not just the finer points of the nation and culture where one is operating, but the nature of insurgency itself. It was, therefore, nothing short of jarring when, on June 23, 2004, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz declared on MSNBC that what was happening in Iraq was “not an insurgency.”
Wolfowitz explained that an “insurgency” is only synonymous with an “uprising.” As such, he continued, the fighting in Iraq does not constitute an insurgency, as it's a “continuation of the war by people who never quit,” waged by the same enemy “that fought us up until the fall of Baghdad and continues to fight afterwards.”
Those with an appreciation for the nuances of counterinsurgency were shocked. Wolfowitz's comments demonstrated that the Pentagon leadership still believed that Iraq could be pacified through the conventional (and escalating) application of force. Moreover, it suggested that senior Bush administration officials were ignoring intelligence reports that the insurgency was far more diverse than holdouts from Saddam Hussein's regime. But perhaps most troubling was that Wolfowitz revealed either flagrant disregard for–or complete ignorance of–an esteemed National Defense University (NDU) text that foresaw these problems 13 years before the fall of Baghdad.
Reflecting the long-standing official disinterest in unconventional warfare studies, many of the U.S. military's war colleges have no courses dedicated to insurgency, and books on the topic are conspicuously absent from required reading lists. One notable exception is a course at NDU's National War College taught by Bard E. O'Neill, author of the seminal Insurgency and Terrorism: Inside Modern Revolutionary Warfare. O'Neill's detached approach and cool demeanor are perfectly captured in his preface, where he writes, “The study of insurgency is fraught with perils, because of the zealotry and partisanship that surrounds the subject. I am not interested in taking positions, but am concerned with straightforward, dispassionate analysis of the strategies of insurgencies that ‘tells it like it is.’”
As O'Neill tells it, an insurgency is not simply (as Wolfowitz would have it) an “uprising.” Rather, he identifies no less than seven distinct types of insurgencies. While four types–anarchist, egalitarian, traditionalist, and pluralist–are of the “uprising” variety, as they seek a total change in political system, the other three–secessionist, reformist, and preservationist–do not, as they're undertaken to maintain or modify a political status quo.
Additionally, O'Neill delineates four specific schools of insurgent strategy: Conspiratorial, in which a small group infiltrates or otherwise disposes of military and political elites with minimal violence (coups, like the one that brought the Ba'athists to power in Iraq in 1968); protracted popular war (the fundamental Maoist strategy of proactively working with the civilian populace while engaging in a multi-stage guerrilla war); military focus, in which insurgents make only minimal attempts to cultivate popular political support, seeing such support as either inevitable or unnecessary on account of guerrilla victories over government forces; and urban warfare, in which terrorism (and, to a lesser extent, guerrilla warfare) are used to create an insecure environment that undermines confidence in the government.
Both official and journalistic sources have identified insurgent elements in Iraq as a mix of former Ba'athist soldiers intent on maintaining the Ba'ath status quo; ordinary Iraqis motivated by a desire to simply oust the Americans and who are gravitating to Ba'athist or Islamist insurgent groups; and Islamist radicals (either homegrown or imported) bent on expelling the Americans first and realizing a more radical religious vision for Iraq later on. By late 2003, the handful of military and intelligence officers mindful of O'Neill's work had pegged the Iraqi insurgency as a fusion of preservationist (Ba'athist)-traditionalist (Islamist), with dashes of anarchist and other tendencies, alternatively or simultaneously pursuing military focus and urban warfare strategies–a complex and challenging reality far removed from the Wolfowitz assertion that the fighting in Iraq was “not an insurgency,” or that it was being perpetrated by one type of fighter with one kind of mentality. 9
In Insurgency and Terrorism, O'Neill cautions that failure to grasp the gradations of insurgent type and strategy often leads government forces to pursue a one-size-fits-all approach, generally taking the militaristic overwhelming-force-and-firepower tack that actually prolongs and exacerbates an insurgency. He also notes that for nations transitioning to independence–an apt enough description for post-Saddam Iraq–overcoming two serious obstacles is key. One is economic under-development; the other is a lack of national unity. Taking all these matters into account, from the vantage point of one of O'Neill's brighter former students, as of summer 2003 the die for a quagmire that would be increasingly difficult to get out of was already more or less cast.
The former O'Neill student I spoke with preferred to remain anonymous–not unreasonably, as he recently retired from a U.S. intelligence agency and, throughout his career, had ample opportunity to contextualize his fieldwork using O'Neill's lessons. When we spoke in mid-2003, he said that it seemed as if, in many respects, the occupation had read O'Neill's book and done the exact opposite. At Iraq's weakest economic moment in modern history, he said, disbanding the army–the country's one force for national unity–represented one axis of ineptitude. That axis intersected with another: the coalition's inability to establish basic legitimacy by providing necessary services, such as regular electricity and other civil support. Such things, he said, were likely to engender both passive and active resistance that would only worsen.
what's old is new (or not)
A number of recent articles in both the popular press and military academic circles have cited the applicability of the U.S. Army's successful counterinsurgency efforts in the Philippines from 1898-1902 (and later again from 1909-1913). With more than a hint of ebullience, they note how the insurgent Filipinos were beat back because U.S. soldiers: really took the time to get to know the natives and understand the culture, which “generated intelligence about guerrillas, allowing U.S. forces to identify them, separate them from the civilian population and break down their networks”; “mobilized popular support by focusing on the improvement of hospitals, schools, infrastructure; maximizing the use of indigenous scouts and paramilitary forces to increase and sustain decentralized patrolling”; took to “going local and going native”; “built up as much as they blew up”; employed “constabulary operations using local indigenous populations” and exercised “good target discipline.”
While there are indeed useful lessons from the Philippines to be applied to Iraq, advocates of the “Philippines Model” tend to gloss over the more draconian aspects of the Philippine campaign that were key to its success. Only one of the aforementioned articles acknowledges that the United States was responsible for numerous atrocities, prompting the Filipinos to respond in kind. And none broaches the matter of whether or not the U.S. effort would have been successful without the use of more brutal “direct” actions that were taken, such as razing villages and forcibly resettling civilians into concentration camps, where tens of thousands died from disease and malnourishment.
Winning hearts and minds: The Philippine Insurrection, 1913.
Indeed, for all the talk about going local and going native, just what this constitutes seems open to interpretation. For instance, in the April/May 2004 issue of the American Enterprise, editor Karl Zinsmeister wrote approvingly of the 82nd Airborne Division commander Gen. Martin Dempsey's “counterinsurgency” measure of shutting down more than a dozen small army posts scattered throughout a quadrant of Baghdad and relocating all the soldiers to a walled compound south of the city.
Such a move is antithetical to the better aspects of the Philippines model, in which “600 small garrisons were more effective than 50” consolidated ones, as Col. Timothy K. Deady noted in a recent essay. 2 In Deady's view, a smart modern-day application of a good Philippine lesson is deploying small units (particularly in cities) for the purposes of “cordoning off neighborhoods, implementing regional pass systems, and enforcing curfews” when needed. While Zinsmeister acknowledged that “by most counterinsurgency theory,” Dempsey's action was “the wrong way to go,” he nonetheless cast Dempsey as a brilliantly counterintuitive innovator, approvingly citing his explanation that the redeployment was done to “diminish the appearance that [U.S. forces are] an occupying army” and to “make Iraqis take more responsibility for their own security, rather than letting them become dependent on American protection.”
Apparently charmed by this effort to nip any incipient welfare-state thinking in the bud, Zinsmeister was eminently satisfied: “The Baghdad base consolidation, I have concluded, is a sign of the confidence our military feels that they've gotten the guerrilla war under control.”
Sources of quoted material, in order: Mark Kukis, “Counterinsurgency 101,” National Journal, November 20, 2004; Lt. Col. Robert M. Cassidy, “Back to the Street Without Joy: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Vietnam and Other Small Wars,” Parameters, Summer 2004; Thomas Donnelly and Vance Serchuk, U.S. Counterinsurgency in Iraq: Lessons from the Philippine War, National Security Outlook, American Enterprise Institute, November 1, 2003; Harry Levins, “War Redux,” St. Louis PostDispatch, July 18, 2004; Maj. Thomas H. Bundt, “An Unconventional War: The Philippine Insurrection, 1899,” Military Review, May-June 2004.
Col. Timothy K. Deady, “Lessons from a Successful Counterinsurgency: The Philippines, 1899-1902,” Parameters, Spring 2005.
But he also noted that beyond giving people the universal basics, few in the occupation seemed to have much interest in understanding certain complicated cultural and political historic realities of Iraq. Among these, he said, was that for the coalition to succeed, at least in the short term, it would have to understand that Saddam's oppressive reign was not just about terror. “Saddam's whole history is one of doing nothing but insurgency and counterinsurgency,” he said. “Starting with the coup, and then doing an internal divide-and-conquer for years by using carrots and sticks–he was good at knowing when to be deftly brutal, or simply brutal, or simply deft…. Where he needed to fight fire with fire–like [suppressing] the al-Dawa [political party] or the Kurds–he did, killing people. Where he could do it by clearing a slum and rebuilding it, putting a Shiite from one tribal clan into a position of power, giving a village something it sorely needed, he did. My point here is that as brutal as Saddam was, he understood that in some cases, delivering basic services was enough to pacify some elements of the population that would otherwise be insurgents.” From where he sat, he said, between the coalition's inability to comprehend and deliver, and the military's fixation with the trappings and illusions of conventional warfare, he did not feel buoyant about the next several years.
Others were looking on with a deep sense of foreboding. At Georgetown University, Don Vandergriff, an army major and scholar twice named ROTC Instructor of the Year, told his students he was not optimistic about what was to come. On November 2, 2003, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top military commander in Iraq, claimed that the mounting guerrilla attacks were “strategically and operationally insignificant.” The Pentagon, meanwhile, was confident that a quick technological fix would stem the rising insurgent tide. (On October 16, 2003, Wolfowitz ordered the services to spend $335.5 million on exclusively mechanical “countermeasures” like aerial surveillance platforms and bomb-frequency jammers.) Vandergriff, however, was gloomy in his analysis. “This is just starting,” he said in November 2003. “They're testing us, figuring us out, and I'm sure we're going to keep thinking that the way to solve this is attrition–blow up one building or square block to take out a few snipers or bombers, and sorry if anyone else gets killed in the process. It's not going to win us any friends. Stringing Baghdad with sensors or putting Predators [drones] over all of Iraq isn't going to stop this, either. We'd be better off with a division of MP's and civil affairs specialists that knew the turf, backed by good native intelligence and police.”
Send in the drones: An army specialist launches a Raven unmanned aerial vehicle to conduct reconnaissance on insurgents.
Similar sentiments could be found among some soldiers on the ground. On November 14, 2003, three army intelligence specialists produced an unclassified but very closely held white paper whose assessments and recommendations stood in stark contrast to those of the uniformed and civilian leadership. Unequivocally stating that “a successful insurgency is preventing the [Coalition Provisional Authority and the Coalition Joint Task Force] from providing a safe and secure environment in Iraq,” the report essentially slammed the U.S. occupation for its unwillingness to understand both counterinsurgency generally and cultural factors in particular. “Western cultural constructs constrain political and military thinking on the subject of counterinsurgency,” the authors pointedly noted, adding that “undue emphasis on military action alone, one that disregards the cultural context for fueling an insurgency, will result in failure.”
Building on O'Neill's typology, the soldiers actually classified much of the unfolding unrest in Iraq as a new category of insurgency called “restorationist” (defined as bent on restoring “an elite group opposed to an occupying authority in order to regain political and economic power”), and held that its unique matrix of constituencies and strategies would make countering it a complicated–though not impossible–matter. But these points merely framed the report's central thrust, which was criticism of the occupation's apparent inability to grasp that decades of urbanization in Iraq have not changed its fundamental nature as a nation of myriad tribes–not merely urban Baghdad or “three information environments made of ethnic and religious categories, the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shia,” as the coalition seemed to have concluded. The “center of gravity” under attack by insurgents was not–as everyone from President George W. Bush to the Pentagon brass had asserted–exclusively “American will.”
A Coke and a smile: U.S. soldiers dine with tribal leaders at Camp Victory, near Abu Ghraib.
Rather, the report noted, the real target was Iraq's tribal socio-political structure. Continued failure to understand this was dooming the occupation's chances of success. “Iraqi history has shown that there is a dialectical relationship between the authority of the state and the power of the tribal elites,” it explained. “When the state was powerful, it would tend toward direct rule by avoiding, or even eliminating, the tribal elites. When vulnerable to external aggression and internal strife, the state, through the power of the tribal elites … would rule indirectly through key tribes.” So far, the report held, occupation forces had not only done a poor job of realizing this and engaging with tribal leaders in a constructive and validating way; they were also engendering ill will by, among other things, the “rough handling of family heads in front of their families.” Such things were deeply offensive, the report held, and “the greatest wild card that the insurgents can exploit is the Coalition's lack of cultural understanding and ability to communicate with the rural population to reinforce the idea that tribal leaders at our policies are attacks against cultural norms, honor, and way of life.”
But as the report was being written and distributed, U.S. forces were perpetuating indignity by kicking in doors and rounding up civilians all over Iraq and, in many cases, wrongfully sending scores of people to army divisional detention centers or Abu Ghraib–where intimidation and torture took place. In this respect, the U.S. Army took the pages out of Colonel Trinquier's playbook that have been almost universally disregarded, as the smarter counterinsurgency specialists recognize both the inefficacy of torture and the counterproductive effect of arbitrary sweeps, detentions, and coercive actions against civilians. Setting aside the fact that little “actionable intelligence” is ever gained under duress, whatever short-term benefits are gained by draconian actions are usually undermined by the long-term festering ill will–both locally and abroad–they often engender.
The army has improved in some areas. Perhaps heeding some of the advice in the tribal policy report, it began outreach programs, including an April 24, 2005, U.S.-led conclave of more than 200 tribal leaders. By late 2004, some Iraq-bound troops were receiving unprecedented training in dealing with situations that have become staples of the soldier's life in Iraq, like dealing with crowds and interacting with tribal officials. Yet, in terms of the non-military aspects of counterinsurgency, tremendous problems still remain. As the Washington Post reported on May 1, 2005, after two years and $1.2 billion, Iraq's power grid is not only not fully back on-line, but is producing less than its pre-liberation output–a state of affairs that has much to do with post-war damage done by looters and insurgents. And the Army Times reported on May 9, 2005 that 80 percent of poor, eastern Baghdad is “soaking in raw sewage,” and no radical plans for building improvement have been discussed. U.S. forces are simply trying to “bring the problem down to an acceptable level.”
Against the backdrop of an insurgency where, according to O'Neill's analysis, the most important factors are good local police and intelligence, Iraqi police continue to be targeted and killed by the score–an act that, as O'Neill and others have pointed out, has worked for insurgents elsewhere in the past by denying nascent governments both cadre and credibility. And when even a slight dip in the number of attacks takes place, U.S. officials proudly proclaim it as possibly the beginning of the end–apparently failing to remember that many of the most successful counterinsurgency campaigns have spanned upwards of a decade. “The operational advantage as to when to conduct small- or large-scale operations lies with the insurgent,” the authors of the November 2003 report noted, commenting upon the ebb and flow of insurgency operations. “One of the insurgents' operational strengths is the capability to escalate or de-escalate methods of operations from subversion through open warfare.” Even more foreboding is their conclusion that “if insurgent forces are permitted to reach a level of mature organization, training, and equipment, [then] larger scale operations may commence.”
Power struggle: Iraqi students study by lamplight after insurgents sabotaged a power plant north of Baghdad.
According to a November 2004 Army War College report, in generic terms, the nature of insurgency is mutating, with the more centralized Maoist “people's war” receding into history and being replaced with “twenty-first-century insurgencies” that “become increasingly networked, with no centralized command and no common strategy, only a unifying objective.” 10 While this will detract from their ability to gain power or make political strides, it also will make them “more survivable in the face of effective counterinsurgent actions.” The report outlines courses of action the United States could take in planning and executing a counter-liberation insurgency campaign, but it also notes that the United States will have to acknowledge that the best that can be hoped for in some situations is pursuing not a strategy of victory, but a strategy of containment, along the lines of Israel's approach to the Palestinians.
Yet what makes the report so striking is its implicit criticism of the current Pentagon leadership. Almost all of its recommendations for defining how the army thinks about the likely staple of current and future warfare–the need for more and better training and education of American troops, more civil affairs and engineering units, better relationships between the army and non-military government agencies, as well as simply an actual acknowledgment of the importance of counterinsurgency doctrine–are far removed from the type of “transformation” pursued by the Rumsfeld Pentagon. Moreover, another of the report's central contentions–that the U.S. military should not exacerbate or legitimize liberation insurgencies by deploying increasing numbers of troops to those conflict zones–stands at odds with a current bipartisan orthodoxy that simply sees increasing enlistments and deployments (without any commensurate doctrinal reform) and new weapons systems as the cure-all. But as Sun-Tzu famously observed, all warfare is based on deception–which, apparently, includes self-deception as well.
Counterinsurgency
↗
↗
↗
For these articles and more, visit the online Bulletin Archive at www.bulletinarchive.org.
Footnotes
1.
Lucian Pye in Internal War, edited by Harry Eckstein (Glencoe: Free Press, 1964).
2.
Steven Metz and Raymond Millen, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in the 21st Century: Reconceptualizing Threat and Response, U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute monograph, November 2004.
3.
John A. Gentry, “Doomed to Fail: America's Blind Faith in Military Technology,” Parameters, Winter 2002-2003.
4.
See, Stephen Biddle et al., Toppling Saddam: Iraq and American Military Transformation, U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute monograph, April 2004.
5.
David Talbot, “How Technology Failed In Iraq,” MIT Technology Review, November 2004.
6.
7.
Jason Vest, “Fourth Generation Warfare,” The Atlantic, December 2001.
8.
9.
Reporting from Time's Michael Ware since 2003 and Vanity Fair's Molly Bingham, in May 2004, have been particularly illustrative on this subject.
10.
Metz and Millen, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in the 21st Century.