Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from “‘Death Solves All Problems’: The Authoritarian Model of Counterinsurgency,” in the latest issue of the Journal of Strategic Studies.   Bashar al-Assad should be losing. His regime has slaughtered civilians, turned Syria’s people against one another, politicized the country’s military, maintained a discriminatory political system, and won neither hearts …

Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from the author’s article in the Journal of Strategic Studies, “‘The People are Revolting’: An Anatomy of Authoritarian Counterinsurgency.”   Scores of dead civilians, smoldering wastelands where villages used to be, a cowering people, and a regime thriving on tyranny and fear — these are the images evoked by the …

In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, French President François Hollande’s declaration of war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State and U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s deployment of a new permanent “expeditionary force” to Iraq make it clear that “small wars” have not yet become a thing of the past. As these limited operations move forward, …

Editor’s note: This is the last in a series of three adapted excerpts from 21st Century Ellis: Operational Art and Strategic Prophecy for the Modern Era, published by Naval Institute Press. It features part of Ellis’ article, “Bush Brigades,” which first appeared in Volume VI, Number 1 of the Marine Corps Gazette in March of …

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of three adapted excerpts from 21st Century Ellis: Operational Art and Strategic Prophecy for the Modern Era, published by Naval Institute Press. It features part of Ellis’ article, “Bush Brigades,” which first appeared in Volume VI, Number 1 of the Marine Corps Gazette in March of 1921. …

Aditya Adhikari, The Bullet and the Ballot Box: The Story of Nepal’s Maoist Revolution (Verso, 2014)   On February 1, 2005, Nepal’s Shah King Gyanendra suspended the constitution, dissolved parliament, and assumed direct rule of a Hindu kingdom besieged by Maoist insurgency. Before severing communication lines and posting army personnel to the capital’s newsrooms, the …

The cell phone rang in my corner of my tactical operations center. “Where are you?” the Afghan elder asked urgently. A commander from the al Qaeda-aligned Haqqani network was drinking tea one compound away, he said. The Haqqani commander was notorious for forcibly recruiting young Afghan villagers to fight for him and for executing anyone …

It has been a challenging year for the Department of Defense. For more than a decade, Operation Iraqi Freedom and the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan highlighted the need for a modern military to be able to operate in complex human terrain. But even as the military continued to fight in Afghanistan, it also faced the …

Edward J. Erickson, Ottomans and Armenians: A Study in Counterinsurgency (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)   It is rare that a military historical study simultaneously informs professional debate and viscerally angers segments of the general audience, but Edward Erickson’s Ottomans and Armenians seems destined to do just that. The book provides valuable insights on the interrelationship of …

The counterinsurgency debate must go on, but is it going anywhere? As expressed in my recent review essay on two books dismissive of counterinsurgency, many critics are more concerned with burying the term than with understanding it and propose no serious alternative for how to address non-state threats and instability around the world. For these …

J.B.E. Hittle, Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War: Britain’s Counterinsurgency Failure (Potomac Books, 2011). Michael Collins and I are unrelated to the best of my belief, but in 1994 I genuflected before his pale death mask in the National Museum of Ireland on Dublin’s Kildare Street. Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War is less his …

Watch our first video podcast, featuring Professors David Ucko and Robert Egnell discussing their new book, Counterinsurgency in Crisis: Britain and the Challenges of Modern Warfare, with our very own Frank Hoffman and Dave Maxwell.       Image: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Matt Snodgrass

Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine in general and the military’s FM 3-24 in particular have been the subject of extensive and often vitriolic debate in recent years.  Now the debate is finally subsiding, but not in a satisfactory way.  It must not be allowed to die yet. The broad cycles of the counterinsurgency debate have followed a …

Counterinsurgency theory underlines the uniqueness of each insurgency, yet also advances an approach that is to apply across time and space. Termed clear-hold-build, the approach involves clearing contested territory through security operations and then holding that territory so as to isolate and defend it from insurgent influence. The build phase, finally, involves economic, developmental or governance-related …

As the U.S. military reels from budgetary battles and withdraws from Afghanistan, commentators offer post-mortem after post-mortem on counter-insurgency (COIN) – an ambitious operational concept-cum-strategy hoisted on its own petard in Afghanistan.  These sundry writers – including military officers, scholars, bloggers, and talking heads – have collectively sought, in the words of one blogger “to fire a …