In many ways, this book represents the culmination of work on the relationship between strategy and violent nonstate actors stretching back the best part of three decades. The content of the chapters that have come to compose this volume has passed through many iterations, both verbal and written, over many years, beginning with doctoral research in the mid-1980s and extending to the teaching of courses on strategy and counterinsurgency, first at the National University of Singapore in the early 1990s, then at the Royal Naval College in the mid-1990s, and finally at King’s College London from the early 2000s. David Martin Jones and I thank the editors and reviewers of the following journals and periodicals for being receptive to our work throughout these years: International Affairs, Review of International Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, The World Today, and World Defence Systems. We are very grateful for their support. Likewise, we extend grateful appreciation to our friends and colleagues Celeste Ward Gventer and John Stone. Celeste provided acute insights into the U.S. policymaking world that would come to elevate counterinsurgency to a position of explicit importance in military and defense circles. From her skeptical and questioning approach, based on hard experience of the most troubled times during the Coalition occupation of Iraq, we learned much. John is a fine strategic theorist, and he undoubtedly helped refine many points of our thinking, thus enhancing the quality of the analysis in the following pages. We are very appreciative of all the excellent work that Anne Routon, Whitney Johnson, and the staff of Columbia University Press have put into commissioning the volume and bringing the manuscript to publication. We are particularly grateful to the anonymous readers who reviewed both the initial proposal and final manuscript for their many helpful insights and recommendations. Finally, we owe much thanks to Bruce Hoffman, the editor of the series in which this study appears, for his always pluralistic, open-handed approach to academic inquiry and his constant encouragement in supporting the publication of this volume.
MLRS
London