Introduction
1. Sherard Cowper-Coles, Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghan Campaign (London: Harper, 2012), 53.
3. See David Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the U.S. Military for Modern Wars (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2009).
4. Others accounts include Ben Anderson, No Worse Enemy: The Inside Story of the Chaotic Struggle for Afghanistan (London: Oneworld, 2011), and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
5. See Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013).
6. The literature on radicalization and deradicalization as well as, of course, on terrorism and counterterrorism more generally produced since 2001 is vast. For illustrative purposes, see Tore Bjørgo, ed., The Roots of Terrorism: Myths, Reality, and Ways Forward (London: Routledge, 2005); Anne Aldis and Graeme P. Herd, eds., The Ideological War on Terror: World-Wide Strategies for Counter-Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2007); Christopher Ankerson, ed., Understanding Global Terror (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007); Omar Ashour, The De-radicalization of Jihadists: Transforming Armed Islamist Movements (London: Routledge, 2009); Tore Bjørgo and John Horgan, eds., Leaving Terrorism Behind: Individual and Collective Disengagement (London: Routledge, 2009).
7. David Martin Jones and M. L. R. Smith, “Greetings from the Cybercaliphate: Some Notes on Homeland Insecurity,” International Affairs 81, no. 5 (2005): 925–50.
8. The signpost text in this respect is John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
9. See James Pritchard and M. L. R. Smith, “Thompson in Helmand: Comparing Theory to Practice in British Counter-Insurgency Operations in Afghanistan,” Civil Wars 12, nos. 1–2 (2010): 65–90.
10. For an important account of this period, see Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Bagdad’s Green Zone (London: Bloomsbury, 2007).
11. Colin H. Kahl, “COIN of the Realm: Is There a Future for Counterinsurgency?” Foreign Affairs 86, no. 6 (2007): 169–74.
12. Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006–2008 (New York: Penguin, 2009).
13. Kahl, “COIN of the Realm,” 175–76.
14. See Oscar Ware, “Preparing for an Irregular Future Counterinsurgency,” Small Wars Journal, July 18, 2013, http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/preparing-for-an-irregular-future-counterinsurgency, accessed October 9, 2013; Steven Metz, “Counterinsurgency and American Strategy, Past and Future,” World Politics Review, January 24, 2012, http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/11248/counterinsurgency-and-american-strategy-past-and-future, accessed October 10, 2013.
15. See, for example, Ken Booth, “War, Security, and Strategy: Towards a Doctrine for Stable Peace,” in Ken Booth, ed., New Thinking About International Security (London: HarperCollins, 1991), 356, and Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
16. For an analysis of this engagement, see Tim Bird and Alex Marshall, Afghanistan: How the West Lost Its Way (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
17. See Celeste Ward Gventer, David Martin Jones, and M. L. R. Smith, eds., The New Counter-Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
18. Cowper-Coles, Cables from Kabul, 279.
19. See Janine Davidson, The Principles of American Counterinsurgency: Evolution and Debate, Counterinsurgency and Pakistan Paper Series (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), 3, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2009/6/08%20counterinsurgency%20davidson/0608_counterinsurgency_davidson.pdf, accessed October 13, 2013; Octavian Manea, “Learning from Today’s Crisis of Counterinsurgency,” Small Wars Journal, October 8, 2013, http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/learning-from-today’s-crisis-of-counterinsurgency, accessed October 13, 2013.
20. See David French, The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945–1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
21. For such critiques, see Jack Fairweather, A War of Choice: Honour, Hubris, and Sacrifice—the British in Iraq, 2003–9 (London: Vintage, 2012); Anderson, No Worse Enemy; Bird and Marshall, Afghanistan; Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City and Little America.
22. As in Gian Gentile, Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency (New York: New Press, 2013); David H. Ucko and Robert Egnell, Counterinsurgency in Crisis: Britain and the Challenges of Modern Warfare (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
24. Cowper-Coles, Cables from Kabul, 139.
25. For such higher goals, see Colin Gray, The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 15–53.
26. Michael Howard, The Causes of Wars (London: Counterpoint, 1983), 36.
27. M. L. R. Smith and John Stone, “Explaining Strategic Theory,” Infinity Journal 1, no. 4 (2011): 27.
28. See, in this context, Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge, 2002), and Ernest Gellner, Relativism and the Social Sciences (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
29. Smith and Stone, “Explaining Strategic Theory.”
30. Thomas C. Schelling, Choice and Consequence: Perspectives of an Errant Economist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 205.
32. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 75.
33. F. Lopez Alves, “Political Crises, Strategic Choices, and Terrorism: The Rise and Fall of the Uruguayan Tuparmaros,” Terrorism and Political Violence 1, no. 2 (1989): 189–214. See also David A. Lake and Robert Powell, eds., Strategic Choice and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
34. Clausewitz, On War, 75, emphasis in original.
35. For example, see Gary Anderson, “Counterinsurgency vs. Counterterrorism,” Small Wars Journal, February 24, 2010, http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/counterinsurgency-vs-counterterrorism, accessed October 10, 2013; Anthony H. Cordesman, “US Strategy in Afghanistan: The Debate We Should Be Having,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, October 7, 2009, http://csis.org/publication/us-strategy-afghanistan, accessed October 2, 2013.
36. Schelling, Choice and Consequence, 198–99.
37. Smith and Stone, “Explaining Strategic Theory,” 30.
38. Harry R. Yarger, Strategic Theory for the 21st Century: The Little Book on Big Strategy (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2006), 2.
1. What Is Counterinsurgency Meant to Counter? The Puzzle of Insurgency
1. See Beatrice Heuser, “The Cultural Revolution in Counter-Insurgency,” Journal of Strategic Studies 30, no. 1 (2007): 153–71.
2. The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 2.
3. Lincoln Krause, “Playing for the Breaks: Insurgent Mistakes,” Parameters 39, no. 4 (2009): 49.
4. British Army, Countering Insurgency, vol. 1, part 10 (Warminster, UK: Ministry of Defence, 2009), 1-4.
5. John Nagl, “Local Security Forces,” in Thomas Rid and Thomas Kearney, eds., Understanding Counterinsurgency: Doctrine, Operations, and Challenges (London: Routledge, 2010), 161.
6. David Kilcullen, “Counterinsurgency Redux,” Survival 48, no. 4 (2006): 112.
7. Bard E. O’Neill, Insurgency and Terrorism: Inside Modern Revolutionary Warfare (Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 1990), 13.
8. Frank Kitson, Low-Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, and Peacekeeping (London: Faber, 1971), 48.
9. Francis Toase, introduction to Robin Corbett, ed., Guerrilla Warfare: From 1939 to the Present Day (London: Guild, 1986), 6–21.
10. See, for example, Richard Clutterbuck, Guerrillas and Terrorists (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977), 22–32.
11. See, for example, Charles E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1896; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and Bison Books, 1996), 21–22.
12. John Shy and Thomas Collier, “Revolutionary War,” in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 817.
13. Toase, introduction to Corbett, Guerrilla Warfare, 6.
14. Ian Beckett, “The Tradition,” in John Pimlott, ed., Guerrilla Warfare (London: Bison, 1985), 8.
15. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 87, 75, 88.
21. Colin Gray, Categorical Confusion? The Strategic Implications of Recognizing Challenges Either as Irregular or Traditional (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2012), 26.
22. Harry Summers, “A War Is a War Is a War Is a War,” in Loren B. Thompson, ed., Low-Intensity Conflict: The Pattern of Warfare in the Modern World (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989), 27–45.
23. For the essentialist case, see M. L. R. Smith, “Guerrillas in the Mist: Reassessing Strategy and Low Intensity Warfare,” Review of International Studies 29, no. 1 (2003): 19–37.
24. John A. Nagl and Brian M. Burton, “Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Modern Wars—a Reply to Smith and Jones,” Journal of Strategic Studies 33, no. 1 (2010): 126.
25. Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency (London: Pall Mall, 1964; reprint, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), xiii, 4.
26. George Armstrong Kelly, Lost Soldiers: The French Army and Empire in Crisis, 1945–62 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 127.
27. Raoul Girardet and Jean-Pierre Thomas, La crise militaire française, 1942–1962: Aspects sociologigques et ideologiques (Paris: Libraire Armand Colin, 1964), 179.
28. Jacques Hogard, “Guerre révolutionnaire ou révolution dans l’art del la guerre,” Revue defénse nationale, no. 12 (December 1956): 1498.
29. Peter Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare from Indochina to Algeria: The Analysis of a Political and Military Doctrine (New York: Praeger, 1964), 4.
30. Serge Chakotine, The Rape of the Masses: The Psychology of Totalitarian Propaganda, trans. E. W. Dickes (New York: Alliance, 1940).
31. Capt. Labignette [no first name given], “Cas concrete de guerre révolutionnaire,” Revue demilitaire l’information, no. 281 (February–March 1957): 30.
32. Trinquier, Modern Warfare, 8, emphasis in original.
33. For Giáp’s strategy, see Bernard Fall, Street Without Joy (London: Pall Mall, 1963; reprint, Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2005), 34–35.
34. Võ Nguyên Giáp, People’s War, People’s Army: The Viet Cong Insurrection Manual for Underdeveloped Countries (New York: Praeger, 1962), 98.
36. See Peter Drake Jackson, “French Ground Force Organizational Development for Counterrevolutionary Warfare Between 1945 and 1962,” MA thesis, Army War College, 2005, 38–118, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/army/sgsc_jackson.pdf, accessed April 14, 2013; Kelly, Lost Soldiers, 91; Trinquier, Modern Warfare, viii–ix; and Paul Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Algeria, 1955–57 (New York: Enigma, 2002), 6.
37. See Clausewitz, On War, 75–77.
38. Bernard Fall, The Vietminh Regime: Government and Administration in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1954), 143.
39. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (London: Pimlico, 1994), 199.
40. Fall, Street Without Joy, 32.
41. Karnow, Vietnam, 201.
42. Kelly, Lost Soldiers, 211.
43. See G. D. Sheffield, “Blitzkrieg and Attrition: Land Operations in Europe 1914–45,” in Colin McInnes and G. D. Sheffield, eds., Warfare in the Twentieth Century: Theory and Practice (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 51–79.
44. See Christopher Cradock and M. L. R. Smith, “No Fixed Values: A Reinterpretation of the Influence of the Theory of Guerre Révolutionnaire and the Battle of Algiers, 1956–1957,” Journal of Cold War Studies 9, no. 4 (2007): 68–105.
45. For such strategic thinking at the time, see John J. McCuen, The Art of Counter-Revolutionary War: The Strategy of Counter-Insurgency (London: Faber, 1966; reprint, St. Petersburg, FL: Hailer, 2005).
46. Colin Gray, Strategic Studies and Public Policy: The American Experience (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1982), 114, 122.
47. See tables 2.1 and 2.2 in K. J. Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 22–24. For further statistical evidence, see table 1 in Barbara F. Walter, “Designing Transitions from Civil War: Demobilization, Democratization, and Commitments to Peace,” International Security 25, no. 1 (1999): 128. Other surveys indicate that the statistical prevalence of intrastate war also predates 1945; see Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (London: Macmillan, 1988), 71, and J. David Singer and Melvin Small, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816–1980 (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1982).
48. Jan Willem Honig, “Strategy in a Post-Clausewitzian Setting,” in Gerd de Nooy, ed., The Clausewitzian Dictum and the Future of Western Military Strategy (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1997), 118.
49. Richard K. Betts, “Should Strategic Studies Survive?” World Politics 50, no. 1 (1997): 7.
50. Quoted in Fall, Street Without Joy, 370.
51. W. Alexander Vacca and Mark Davidson, “The Regularity of Regular Warfare,” Parameters 41, no. 2 (2011): 24.
53. See, for example, Bjørn Møller, “The Faces of War,” in Håkan Wiberg and Christian P. Scherrer, eds., Ethnicity and Intra-state Conflict: Types, Causes, and Peace Strategies (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999), 15.
54. John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Vintage, 1994), 58.
55. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 13.
56. Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: Free Press, 1991), 57–58.
57. Montgomery McFate, “The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture,” Joint Forces Quarterly 38, 3rd quarter (2005): 43.
58. Honig, “Strategy in a Post-Clausewitzian Setting,” 110.
59. Clausewitz, On War, 87–88.
60. Gray, Categorical Confusion? 12.
61. Many examples across the military studies literature past and present reflect this tendency. See, for example, Donald Featherstone, Colonial Small Wars, 1837–1901 (Newtown Abbot, UK: David and Charles, 1973), 11–13; Juliet Lodge, ed., Terrorism: A Challenge to the State (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981); Richard A. Preston, Alex Roland, and Sydney F. Wise, Men in Arms: A History of Warfare and Its Interrelationships with Western Society (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), 359–85.
62. William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941 (Boston: Little Brown, 1941), 556.
63. See J. F. C. Fuller, The Second World War, 1939–45: A Strategical and Tactical History (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1954), 83–89, and Armand Van Ishoven, The Luftwaffe and the Battle of Britain (New York: Scribner, 1980).
64. Nagl and Burton, “Thinking Globally and Acting Locally,” 125, 126.
65. Quoted in Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy (New York: Delta, 1967), 413.
66. David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (1964; reprint, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 63; British Army, Countering Insurgency, 3-3.
67. US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, ii.
68. Michael Howard, The Causes of War (London: Counterpoint, 1983), 86.
69. M. L. R. Smith and John Stone, “Explaining Strategic Theory,” Infinity Journal 1, no. 4 (2011): 27–28.
70. See Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 83–118.
71. Summers, “A War Is a War Is a War Is a War,” 44–45.
72. Vacca and Davidson, “The Regularity of Regular Warfare,” 19, 23.
73. Paul Beaver, “The Threat to Israel Is Not War,” Asian Wall Street Journal, October 24, 2000.
74. See Brendan Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (London: Penguin, 2001).
75. Edward Luttwak, “Give War a Chance,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 4 (1999): 36–44.
76. See Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both, Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime (London: Penguin, 1996), 71–98, and James Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War (London: Hurst, 1997), 298–331.
77. See Alec Russell, “How the West Turned a Blind Eye Despite General’s ‘Genocide Fax,’ ” Daily Telegraph, April 6, 2004.
78. Vacca and Davidson, “The Regularity of Regular Warfare,” 24.
79. For a survey of such decisions, see Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954–1962 (London: Penguin, 2002).
80. See Sherard Cowper-Coles, Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghan Campaign (London: Harper, 2012), xxii, 53, 64–65, 120, 145, 178, 200, 223, 258.
81. See Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (London, Bloomsbury, 2013), 217–35.
82. John Mackinlay, “Tackling Bin Laden: Lessons from History,” Observer, October 28, 2001.
83. For example, see the discussion in John Bew, Martyn Frampton, and Iñigo Gurruchaga, Talking to Terrorists: Making Peace in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country (London: Hurst, 2009).
84. US Army/Marines Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 18.
85. Lawrence Freedman, “Globalization and the War Against Terrorism,” in Christopher Ankerson, ed., Understanding Global Terror (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007), 227.
86. Gray, Categorical Confusion? 48.
87. Clausewitz, On War, 88–89.
2. Counterinsurgency and Strategy: Problems and Paradoxes
1. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 278.
2. For assessments of this alternative view, see Douglas Ollivant, Countering the New Orthodoxy: Reinterpreting Counterinsurgency in Iraq, National Security Studies Program Policy Paper (Washington, D.C.: New America Foundation, June 2011), http://www.newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/Ollivant_ Reinterpreting_Counterinsurgency.pdf, accessed February 6, 2012; as well as Stephen Biddle, Jeffrey A. Friedman, and Jacob N. Schapiro, “Testing the Surge: Why Did Violence Decline in Iraq in 2007?” in Celeste Ward Gventer, David Martin Jones, and M. L. R. Smith, eds., The New Counter-Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 201–31.
3. Chandrasekaran, Little America, 118.
4. Quoted in ibid., 125–26.
6. That the assassination of Osama bin Laden was a primary aim of U.S. policy was clear in statements by the president soon after the 9/11 attacks. In his address to Congress on September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush announced: “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group with global reach has been found, stopped and defeated” (“Text of George Bush’s Speech,” Guardian, September 21, 2001).
7. Dan Murphy, “One Year After bin Laden’s Killing, al-Qaeda Is in Tatters,” Christian Science Monitor, May 1, 2012.
8. See David Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the US Military for Modern Wars (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2009).
9. See, for example, Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006–2008 (New York: Penguin, 2009).
10. Kimberley Kagan, The Surge: A Military History (New York: Encounter, 2009), 202. See also Peter R. Mansoor, Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War (New Haven: Yale University of Press, 2013).
14. On the logical incoherence of concept stretching, see John Kadvany, Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 85–88.
15. The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 2.
17. Michael Howard, The Causes of War (London: Counterpoint, 1983), 36.
18. Basil Liddell Hart, Strategy: The Indirect Approach (London: Faber, 1967), 335.
19. On the notion of strategy as maximizing power and outcome, see Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 575–629.
20. Antulio J. Echevarria, “Reconsidering War’s Logic and Grammar,” Infinity Journal 1, no. 2 (2011): 4.
22. For the latter, see, for example, Air Staff, AP 3000: British Air and Space Power Doctrine (London: UK Ministry of Defence, 2009); Zachary Fryer-Biggs, “DoD’s New Cyber Doctrine: Panetta Defines Deterrence, Preempting Strategy,” Defensenews.com, October 13, 2012, http://www.defensenews.com/article/20121013/DEFREG02/310130001/DoD-8217-s-New-Cyber-Doctrine, accessed March 5, 2013.
23. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 89.
26. John A. Nagl and Brian M. Burton, “Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Modern Wars—a Reply to Smith and Jones,” Journal of Strategic Studies 33, no. 1 (2010): 125.
28. Bernard Fall, “Counterinsurgency: The French Experience,” speech to the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, Washington, D.C., January 18, 1963.
29. Harry Eckstein, “On the Etiology of Internal Wars,” History and Theory 4, no. 2 (1965): 133.
30. Steven R. David, “Review Article: Internal War, Causes and Cures,” World Politics 49, no. 4 (1997): 568.
31. David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (1964; reprint, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006); Robert Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency (London: Pall Mall, 1964; reprint, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006); Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences from Malaya and Vietnam (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966); Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, and Peacekeeping (London: Faber, 1971).
32. Thomas Rid, “The Nineteenth Century Origins of Counterinsurgency Doctrine,” Journal of Strategic Studies 33, no. 5 (2010): 727–58.
33. William A. Hosington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995); Michael P. M. Finch, A Progressive Occupation? The Gallieni–Lyautey Method of Colonial Pacification in Tonkin and Madagascar, 1885–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
34. Charles Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1896; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and Bison Books, 1996); Charles Gwynn, Imperial Policing (London: Macmillan, 1934).
35. H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1997); John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Peter R. Mansoor, Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander’s War in Iraq (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (London: Hurst, 2009), and Counterinsurgency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
36. For an analysis of COIN thinking along these lines, see Gian Gentile, Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency (New York: New Press, 2013), 34–58.
37. Andrew F. Krepenivich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); McMaster, Dereliction of Duty.
38. Richard Clutterbuck, The Long, Long War: The Emergency in Malaya, 1948–1960 (London: Cassell, 1966).
39. See, for example, Wade Markel, “Draining the Swamp: The British Strategy of Population Control,” Parameters 36, no. 1 (2006): 35–48; Walter C. Ladwig, “Managing Counterinsurgency: Lessons from Malaya,” Military Review, May–June 2007, 56–66; Maj. Michael D. Sullivan, “Leadership in Counterinsurgency: A Tale of Two Leaders,” Military Review, September–October 2007, 119–23.
40. Clutterbuck, The Long Long War, 131.
41. See U.S. Army, PRT Playbook: Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Center for Army Lessons Learned, 2007). For an assessment of the role of Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan, see James Pritchard and M. L. R. Smith, “Thompson in Helmand: Comparing Theory to Practice in British Counter-Insurgency Operations in Afghanistan,” Civil Wars 12, nos. 1–2 (2010): 65–90.
42. Karl Hack, “ ‘Iron Claws on Malaya’: The Historiography of the Malayan Emergency,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 30, no. 1 (1999): 102.
43. In particular, see the work of Huw Bennett, who argues that the British Army perceived harsh methods as a necessary precursor to “hearts and minds” operations: “Minimum Force in British Counter-Insurgency,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 21, no. 3 (2010): 459–75; “The Other Side of the COIN: Minimum and Exemplary Force in British Army Counter-Insurgency in Kenya,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 18, no. 4 (2007): 638–64; and “ ‘A Very Salutary Effect’: The Counter-Terror Strategy in the Early Malayan Emergency, June 1948 to December 1949,” Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 3 (2009): 414–44.
44. David Martin Jones and M. L. R. Smith, “The Perils of Hyper-vigilance: The War on Terrorism and the Surveillance State in South-East Asia,” Intelligence and National Security 17, no. 4 (2002): 31–54.
45. The example of Malaya is referenced at various points in The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual and the British Army’s manual Countering Insurgency, vol. 1, part 10 (Warminster, UK: Ministry of Defence, 2009). No mention is made of the broader legal and military context in which British operations were conducted. In the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, the main allusion to the Malayan Emergency is to the effectiveness of the British in developing a civilian police force to function alongside the military (see 234–35).
46. See Karl Hack, “The Malayan Emergency as a Counter-Insurgency Paradigm,” Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 3 (2009): 394–96.
47. An explicit relationship between grievance settlement and counterinsurgency is made in British Army, Countering Insurgency, 2-3 and 2-4.
48. John Mackinlay, Globalisation and Insurgency, Adelphi Paper no. 352 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies and Oxford University Press, 2002), 33.
50. Nagl and Burton, “Thinking Globally and Acting Locally,” 135–36.
51. See, in this context, David Martin Jones, “Politics, Statecraft, and the Art of War,” Infinity Journal 4, no. 2 (2014): 18–24.
52. The deeper reasons why military professionals, notably those in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, eschew politics fall outside the scope of this study, but C. Wright Mills perhaps provides an explanation: “Inside their often trim bureaucracy, where everything seems under neat control, army officers have felt that ‘politics’ is a dirty, uncertain, and ungentlemanly kind of game; and in terms of their status code, they have often felt that politicians were unqualified creatures inhabiting an uncertain world” (The Power Elite [New York: Oxford University Press, 1956], 174).
53. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1981) 88.
56. KCL Insurgency Group, “Reviewing UK Army Countering Insurgency,” meeting, June 20, 2007, King’s College London, notes taken by the group’s chair and circulated internally.
57. Montgomery McFate, “The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture,” Joint Forces Quarterly 38, 3rd quarter (2005): 43.
58. For such a misunderstanding, see, among other sources, Martin Van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: Free Press, 1991), 33–62; K. J. Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–18; Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in the Global Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 20–23; John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Vintage, 1994), 13–30; John Mueller, “The Banality of Ethnic War,” International Security 25, no. 1 (2000): 42–70; Ralph Peters, “The New Strategic Trinity,” Parameters 28, no. 4 (1998–1999): 73–79.
59. Clausewitz, On War, 89.
61. Colin S. Gray, The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 29.
62. Helmuth von Moltke, Moltke on the Art of War: Selected Writings, ed. Daniel J. Hughes (New York: Presidio, 1993), 45.
63. See John Stone, Military Strategy: The Politics and Technique of War (London: Continuum, 2011), 4–13.
64. The original U.S. document was US Department of the Army, Counterinsurgency, FM3-24/MCWP 3-33.5 (Washington, D.C.: US Department of the Army, Headquarters, 2006), followed in 2007 by the Counterinsurgency Field Manual.
65. Geoffrey Till, “The Evolution of Strategy in the New World Order,” in Craig A. Snyder, ed., Contemporary Security and Strategy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 97.
67. See British Army, Countering Insurgency, 3-3, and Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, 63.
68. Quoted in British Army, Countering Insurgency, 3-3, 3-4
69. For a survey of the situation in Afghanistan, see Tim Bird and Alex Marshall, Afghanistan: How the West Lost Its Way (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
70. Office of the President of the United States, National Security Strategy (Washington, D.C.: Office of the President of the United States, 2010), 21.
71. Again, the British counterinsurgency manual superficially appears to recognize the role of ideology, but in tactically instrumental terms as a “mechanism of motivation” employed by insurgent leaders to mobilize followers (British Army, Countering Insurgency, 2-5).
72. Nagl and Burton, “Thinking Globally and Acting Locally,” 126.
73. Gian Gentile, “A Strategy of Tactics: Population-Centric COIN and the Army,” Parameters 39, no. 3 (2009): 5–7.
75. Gentile, “A Strategy of Tactics,” 5–9.
76. Gentile, Wrong Turn, 85–110.
77. This narrative theme is explored in Joshua Rovner, “The Heroes of COIN,” Orbis 52, no. 2 (2012): 215–32.
81. See Sullivan, “Leadership in Counterinsurgency,” 119–23.
82. Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1999).
84. Gentile, Wrong Turn, 85.
85. See Tom Englehardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 234–41.
86. The Legacy of Lawrence of Arabia, BBC2, Episode 1, January 16, 2010, and Episode 2, January 23, 2010.
87. See, for example, Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, “The Post-colonial Moment in Security Studies,” Review of International Studies 32, no. 2 (2006): 329.
88. See John Nagl, “Let’s Win the Wars We’re In,” Joint Forces Quarterly 52, 1st quarter (2009): 20–26.
89. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, 18.
91. Colin Gray, “Thinking Asymmetrically in Times of Terror,” Parameters 32, no. 1 (2002): 13.
92. US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, liii.
93. The British Army’s manual Countering Insurgency also stipulates a set of “ten [self-evident] principles for counterinsurgency”: “1. Primacy of political purpose. 2. Unity of effort. 3. Understand the human terrain. 4. Secure the population. 5. Neutralise the insurgent. 6. Gain and maintain popular support. 7. Operate in accordance with the law. 8. Integrate intelligence. 9. Prepare for the long term. 10. Learn and adapt” (1-2, 3-2).
94. Sarah Sewall, “Introduction to the University of Chicago Press Edition: A Radical Field Manual,” in US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, xxxiii.
95. Quoted in John Nagl, “Constructing the Legacy of Field Manual 3-24,” Joint Forces Quarterly 58, 3rd quarter (2010): 118.
96. See, for example, Gentile, Wrong Turn, 89–94.
3. Counterinsurgency and the Ideology of Modernization
1. Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006), 228–32.
2. John Nagl, “Foreword to the University of Chicago Press Edition,” in The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), xv.
3. Eric Voegelin, Modernity Without Restraint: Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000).
4. Sherard Cowper-Coles, Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghan Campaign (London: Harper, 2012), 277–78.
5. Gian Gentile, Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency (New York: Free Press, 2013), 7.
6. Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006–2008 (New York: Penguin, 2009); Victor Davis Hanson, The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—from Ancient Greece to Iraq (London: Bloomsbury 2013).
7. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 118.
8. US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 200.
10. US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 37.
11. Quoted in Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 1.
13. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Change to Change: Modernization, Development, and Politics,” Comparative Politics 3, no. 3 (1971): 284, 285.
14. Charles Lindblom, “Political Science in the 1940s and 1950s,” Daedalus 126, no. 1 (1997): 230.
15. Leonard Binder, “The Natural History of Development Theory,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28, no. 1 (1986): 10.
16. Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: Free Press, 1951); Edward Shils, Tradition (London: Faber and Faber, 1981).
17. Talcott Parsons, On Institutions and Social Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 24.
19. Karl Deutsch, The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control (New York: Free Press 1963), 145.
21. Binder, “The Natural History of Development Theory,” 11.
22. Huntington, “The Change to Change,” 287–88.
24. See Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 155–202.
25. Marion J. Levy, Modernization: Latecomers and Survivors (New York: Free Press, 1972), 3, 136.
26. Dankwart A. Rustow, A World of Nations: Problems of Political Modernization (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1972), 6.
27. David E. Apter, The Politics of Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 9–10, 43.
28. Huntington, “The Change to Change,” 289–90.
30. Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (New York: Free Press, 1958).
31. Gabriel Almond and James S. Coleman, eds., The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).
32. Huntington, “The Change to Change,” 314.
33. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 6.
34. Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba, introduction to Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba, eds., Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 11.
35. Leonard Binder, James S. Colman, Joseph LaPalombara, Lucian W. Pye, Sidney Verba, and Myron Weiner, Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).
36. Rustow, A World of Nations.
37. Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry Into the Poverty of Nations (London: Allen Lane and Penguin, 1968), 20.
38. W. W. Rostow, Politics and the Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 50–53, 65.
40. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, 11.
46. Seymour Martin Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review 53, no. 1 (1959): 75.
47. Johanna Bockman, review of Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America, Journal of Cold War Studies 8, no. 2 (2006): 141.
48. Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 4–5.
49. See Andrew Hurrell and Ngaire Woods, “Globalization and Inequality,” Millennium 24, no. 3 (1995): 447–70.
50. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992), 287–340.
51. McDougall, Promised Land, 173.
52. See Andrew J. Bacevich and Elizabeth H. Prodromou, “God Is Not Neutral: Religion and US Foreign Policy After 9/11,” Orbis 48, no. 1 (2001): 43–54; Garry Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2005), 203–35; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
53. US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 2.
54. Sarah Sewall, “Introduction to the University of Chicago Press Edition: A Radical Field Manual,” in US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, xxx.
55. Kilcullen, “Twenty-Eight Articles,” 8.
56. See Philip A. Brown and M. L. R. Smith, “The Rise of Gulf War Paradigm 2.0,” Orbis 58, no. 1 (2013): 83–103.
57. For example, K. J. Holsti’s statistical assessment indicates that 75 percent of the 164 cases of warfare identified since the end of World War II involved armed conflict within state boundaries, and only 18–20 percent of cases can accurately be termed “interstate wars” (The State, War, and the State of War [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 22–24).
58. Lt. Gen. Sir John Kiszley, “Learning About Counterinsurgency,” Military Review, March–April 2007, 10.
59. See Walter LaFeber, “The Rise and Fall of Colin Powell,” Political Science Quarterly 124, no. 1 (2009): 71–93.
60. Quoted in Nagl, “Foreword,” xiv.
61. David Ucko, “Innovation or Inertia? The US Military and the Learning of Counterinsurgency,” Orbis 52, no. 2 (2008): 291.
62. David C. Hendrickson and Robert W. Tucker, “Revisions in Need of Revising: What Went Wrong in the Iraq War,” Survival 47, no. 2 (2005): 7–32.
63. See, for example, Ahmed S. Hashem, “The Insurgency in Iraq,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 14, no. 3 (2003): 1–22; Alistair Finlan, “Trapped in the Dead Ground: US Counter-Insurgency Strategy in Iraq,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 16, no. 1 (2005): 1–21; Robert Tomes, “Schlock and Blah: Counter-Insurgency Realities in a Rapid Dominance Era,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 16, no. 1 (2005): 37–56; Jeffrey Record, “Why the Strong Lose,” Parameters 35, no. 4 (2005–2006): 16–31.
64. Nagl, “Foreword,” xv.
65. See, for example, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, “Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq,” Military Review, January–February 2006, 2–11.
66. Ucko, “Innovation or Inertia?” 294.
67. In particular, see Nigel Aylwin-Foster, “Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations,” Military Review, November–December 2005, 2–15.
68. Frank G. Hoffman, “Neo-classical Insurgency?” Parameters 37, no. 2 (2007): 71–87.
69. Examples of this literature include: Jonathan Stevenson, “We Wrecked the Place”: Contemplating an End to Northern Ireland’s Troubles (New York: Free Press, 1996); Malachi O’Doherty, The Trouble with Guns: Republican Strategy and the Provisional IRA (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1998); Michael Page, Prisons, Peace, and Terrorism: Penal Policy and the Reduction of Terrorism in Northern Ireland, Italy, and the Basque Country, 1968–97 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1998); Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA (London: Penguin, 2002); Peter Neumann, Britain’s Long War: British Strategy in the Northern Ireland Conflict, 1969–98 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
70. For more on McFate, see Matthew B. Stannard, “Montgomery McFate’s Mission,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 29, 2007.
71. Montgomery McFate, “The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture,” Joint Forces Quarterly 38, 3rd quarter (2005): 42.
72. Montgomery McFate, “Iraq: The Social Context of IEDs,” Military Review, May–June 2005, 37–40.
73. Montgomery McFate and Andrea Jackson, “An Organizational Solution for DOD’s Cultural Knowledge Needs,” Military Review, July–August 2005, 18.
74. US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 27.
75. For a survey of this area, see Col. Clinton J. Ancker, “Doctrine for Asymmetric Warfare,” Military Review, July–August 2003, 18–25; Patrick Porter, “Shadow Wars: Asymmetric Warfare in the Past and Future,” Security Dialogue 37, no. 4 (2006): 551–61.
76. Rupert Smith’s The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2005) is the seminal work in this developing field, although Mary Kaldor’s New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) also foreshadowed much of this debate.
77. See, for example, Andrew Dorman, Matthew Uttley, and M. L. R. Smith, eds., The Changing Face of Military Power: Joint Warfare in an Expeditionary Era (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002).
78. John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 51.
79. Montgomery McFate and Andrea V. Jackson, “The Object of War: Counterinsurgency and the Four Tools of Political Competition,” Military Review, January–February 2006, 13–16.
80. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, 216.
81. Quoted in Stannard, “Montgomery McFate’s Mission.”
83. See, for example, Eliot Cohen, Conrad Crane, Jan Horvath, and John Nagl, “Principles, Imperatives, and Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency,” Military Review, March–April 2006, 49–53.
84. Nagl, “Foreword,” xiii–xx.
85. Montgomery McFate, “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relationship,” Military Review, March–April 2005, 24, 27.
86. Beatrice Heuser, “The Cultural Revolution in Counter-Insurgency,” Journal of Strategic Studies 30, no. 1 (2007): 165.
87. Ucko, “Innovation or Inertia?” 308.
88. See, for example, Lt. Col. Robert M. Cassidy, “The Savage Wars of Peace,” Military Review, November–December 2004, 76–77, and “Winning the War of the Flea,” Military Review, September 2004, 41–46; Lt. Col. Wade M. Markel, “Draining the Swamp: The British Strategy of Population Control,” Parameters 36, no. 1 (2006): 35–48, and “Winning Our Own Hearts and Minds: Promotion in Wartime,” Military Review, November–December 2004, 25–30; Lt. Col. James D. Campbell, “French Algeria and British Northern Ireland: Legitimacy and the Rule of Law in Low-Intensity Conflict,” Military Review, March–April 2005, 2–5; Lou DiMarco, “Losing the Moral Compass: Torture and Guerre Revolutionnaire in the Algerian War,” Parameters 36, no. 2 (2006): 63–76; Brian A. Jackson, “Counterinsurgency Intelligence in a ‘Long War’: The British Experience in Northern Ireland,” Military Review, January–February 2007, 74–85; Walter C. Ladwig, “Managing Counterinsurgency: Lessons from Malaya,” Military Review, May–June 2007, 56–66; Maj. Michael D. Sullivan, “Leadership in Counterinsurgency: A Tale of Two Leaders,” Military Review, September–October 2007, 119–23.
89. See David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (1964; reprint, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), and Pacification in Algeria, 1956–1958 (1963; reprint, Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2006); Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency (London: Pall Mall, 1964; reprint, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006); Bernard Fall, Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina (London: Pall Mall, 1963; reprint, Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2005); John J. McCuen, The Art of Counter-Revolutionary War: The Strategy of Counterinsurgency (London: Faber, 1966; reprint, St. Petersburg, FL: Hailer 2005).
90. There was, of course, always a residual academic interest in matters of insurgency even during the years of the Cold War, as represented by the writings of academics such as Charles Townshend, I. F. W. Beckett, and others located ostensibly around the British Army’s officer training and staff college at Camberley, Surrey. See, for example, Ian F. W. Beckett, The Roots of Counterinsurgency: Armies and Guerrilla Warfare (London: Blanford, 1988); Ian F. W. Beckett and John Pimlott, eds., Armed Forces and Modern Counterinsurgency (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985); Charles Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars: Counterinsurgency in the Twentieth Century (London: Faber & Faber, 1986). In the United States, the study of insurgency/counterinsurgency also retained a marginal following. On the one hand, a handful of scholars such as the historian Thomas Mockaitis showed an interest in the British experience of counterinsurgency, and other analysts produced studies on the subject framed within the context of conducting inquests into the American performance in Vietnam. See, for example, Thomas R. Mockaitis, British Counter-Insurgency, 1919–1960 (London: Macmillan, 1990), and Andrew Krepenevich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
91. Colin Gray, “Thinking Asymmetrically in Times of Terror,” Parameters 32, no. 1 (2002): 13.
92. There are too many examples to enumerate, but for a selection see Kalev I. Sepp, “Best Practices in Counterinsurgency,” Military Review, May–June 2005, 8–12; Col. Thomas X. Hammes, “Countering Evolved Insurgent Networks,” Military Review, July–August 2006, 18–26; and Jan S. Breemer, “Statistics, Real Estate, and the Principles of War: Why There Is No Unified Theory of War,” Military Review, September–October 2006, 84–89.
93. Sarah Sewall, “Modernizing US Counterinsurgency Practice: Rethinking Risk and Developing a National Strategy,” Military Review, September–October 2006, 103.
95. John A. Lynn, “Patterns of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency,” Military Review, July–August 2005, 27.
97. See Col. James K. Greer, “Operation Knockout: COIN in Iraq,” Military Review, November–December 2005, 16–19; Petraeus, “Learning Counterinsurgency.” For a broader survey of the effects of this learning process, see Frederick W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan, “The Patton of Counterinsurgency,” Weekly Standard, October 3, 2008.
98. Lt. Col. Chris Gibson, “Battlefield Victories and Strategic Success: The Path Forward in Iraq,” Military Review, September–October 2006, 49.
99. Capt. Travis Patriquin, “Using Occam’s Razor to Connect the Dots: The Ba’ath Party and the Insurgency in Tal Afar,” Military Review, January–February 2007, 16–25.
100. This is not to say that the efforts to make the U.S. Army embrace COIN thinking did not encounter resistance. For the contending positions, see the debate between John Nagl and Gian Gentile: John Nagl, “Let’s Win the Wars We’re In,” Joint Forces Quarterly 52, 1st quarter (2009): 20–26, and Gian Gentile, “Let’s Build an Army to Win All Wars,” Joint Forces Quarterly, 52, 1st quarter (2009): 27–33.
101. See also Carter Malkasian, “The Role of Perceptions and Political Reform in Counterinsurgency: The Case of Western Iraq, 2004–05,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 17, no. 3 (2006): 367–94; Warren Chin, “Examining the Application of British Counterinsurgency Doctrine by the American Army in Iraq,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 18, no. 1 (2007): 1–26; James Corum, “Rethinking US Army Counter-Insurgency Doctrine,” Contemporary Security Policy 28, no. 1 (2007): 127–42.
102. Of the many possible contributions in this respect, see Maj. Morgan Mann, “The Power Equation: Using Tribal Politics in Counterinsurgency,” Military Review, May–June 2007, 104–8; Col. Joseph D. Celeski, “Attacking Insurgent Space: Sanctuary Denial and Border Interdiction,” Military Review, November–December 2006, 51–57; Col. Gregory Wilson, “Anatomy of a Successful COIN Operation: OEF-Philippines and the Indirect Approach,” Military Review, November–December 2006, 2–12; Michael R. Melillo, “Outfitting a Big-War Military with Small-War Capabilities,” Parameters 36, no. 3 (2006): 22–35; David M. Tressler, Negotiation in the New Strategic Environment: Lessons from Iraq (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2007); James Clancy and Chuck Crossett, “Measuring Effectiveness in Irregular Warfare,” Parameters 37, no. 2 (2007): 88–100; Brian Reed, “A Social Network Approach to Understanding an Insurgency,” Parameters 37, no. 2 (2007): 19–30; Jeffrey Record, “External Assistance: Enabler of Insurgent Success,” Parameters 36, no. 3 (2006): 36–49; Jim Baker, “Systems Thinking and Counterinsurgencies,” Parameters 36, no. 4 (2006–2007): 26–43; Raymond Millen, “The Hobbesian Notion of Self-Preservation Concerning Human Behavior During an Insurgency,” Parameters 36, no. 4 (2006–2007): 4–13.
103. See, for example, Christopher M. Ford, “Speak No Evil: Targeting a Population’s Neutrality to Defeat an Insurgency,” Parameters 35, no. 4 (2005): 51–66; Lt. Col. Douglas A. Ollivant and Lt. Eric D. Chewing, “Producing Victory: Rethinking Conventional Forces in COIN Operations,” Military Review, July–August 2006, 50–59; David Betz, “Redesigning Land Forces for ‘Wars Amongst the People,’ ” Contemporary Security Policy 28, no. 2 (2007): 221–43; Major Mark P. Krieger, “We the People Are Not the Center of Gravity,” Military Review, July–August 2007, 96–100; Col. Peter R. Mansoor and Maj. Mark S. Ulrich, “Linking Doctrine to Action: A New Center-of-Gravity Analysis,” Military Review, September–October 2007, 45–51.
104. US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, i.
105. Colin Jackson, “Government in a Box? Counter-Insurgency, State Building, and the Technocratic Conceit,” in Celeste Ward Gventer, David Martin Jones, and M. L. R. Smith, eds., The New Counter-Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 92.
108. On the idea of the Leviathan state as the basis of security and the decline of violence, see Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity (London: Penguin, 2011).
109. Jackson, “Government in a Box?” 82–83.
110. Kilcullen, “Twenty-Eight Articles,” 1.
111. US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 55.
112. Sewall, “Introduction,” xxxvii.
115. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1981), 101.
116. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), 24–25.
117. US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 35.
118. For this division of the population into three groups, see figure 1.1, “Example Logical Lines of Operations for a Counterinsurgency,” in US Army/Marines Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 155.
120. The International Security Assistance Force statement formally claims its mission to be: “In support of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, ISAF conducts operations in Afghanistan to reduce the capability and will of the insurgency, support the growth in capacity and capability of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), and facilitate improvements in governance and socio-economic development in order to provide a secure environment for sustainable stability that is observable to the population.” See http://www.isaf.nato.int/mission.html, accessed November 5, 2011.
121. Gentile, Wrong Turn, 119.
122. Rostow, Politics and the Stages of Growth, 135.
124. Rostow cited in Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1996), 38.
127. Hans Morgenthau, “Vietnam and the National Interest,” in Marvin E. Gettleman, ed., Vietnam: History, Documents, and Opinions on a Major Crisis (London: Penguin, 1965), 391.
128. See, among other sources, Anthony H. Cordesman, “Shape, Clear, Hold, Build, and Transfer”: The Full Metrics of the Afghan War (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, February 18, 2010), http://csis.org/files/publication/100302_afghan_metrics_combined.pdf, accessed March 30, 2012.
130. US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 51.
131. Alex Marshall, “Imperial Nostalgia, the Liberal Lie, and the Perils of Postmodern Counterinsurgency,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 21, no. 2 (2010): 235.
133. Michael Oakeshott, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 45–67.
134. See Jeffrey H. Michaels and Matthew Ford, “Bandwagonistas: Rhetorical Re-description, Strategic Choice, and the Politics of Counter-Insurgency,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 22, no. 2 (2011): 352–84.
4. The Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency and Globalization
1. The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 38–50.
3. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 64.
4. John Baylis and Steve Smith, introduction to John Baylis and Steve Smith, eds., The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 9.
5. Anthony G. McGrew, “Conceptualizing Global Politics,” in Anthony G. McGrew and Paul G. Lewis, eds., Global Politics, Globalization, and the Nation-State (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1992), 23.
6. Thomas Larsonn, The Race to the Top: The Real Story of Globalization (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2001), 9.
7. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992); Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Anchor Books, 2000).
8. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Globalization as Hybridization,” in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson, eds., Global Modernities (London: Sage, 1995), 99–100.
9. David Held and Anthony McGrew, “The End of the Old Order? Globalization and the Prospects for World Order,” Review of International Studies 24, no. 3 (1998), 232.
10. Colin Hay and David Marsh, “Introduction: Demystifying Globalization,” in Colin Hay and David Marsh, eds., Demystifying Globalization (London: Macmillan, 2000), 3.
11. See Jeffrey S. Juris, Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 2.
12. For example, see Bernard-Henri Lévy, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism (New York: Random House, 2008), and Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2000).
13. Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, “The Post-colonial Moment in Security Studies,” Review of International Studies 32, no. 2 (2006): 329.
14. For the classic exposition of this thesis, see Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 12 vols., ed. J. B. Bury (New York: Fred de Fau, 1904), vol. 4, chap. 38, parts I–III.
15. Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
16. Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994), 199.
17. See Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Faith, States, and Community in the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 18.
18. See Elie Kedourie, Afghani and Adud: An Essay on Religious Unbelief and Political Activism in Modern Islam (London: Cass, 1966); Nikki R. Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of Jamal a-Din “al-Afghani” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
19. Natana J. Delong-Bas, Wahabi Islam: From Revival to Reform to Global Jihad (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004).
20. Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (New York: Mother Mosque Foundation, 1979), 81, 94.
21. William E. Shepherd, Sayyid Qutb and Islamic Activism (Leiden: Brill, 1996).
22. Qutb, Milestones, 63–70.
23. Ayman Muhammad Rabi al-Zawahiri, quoted in Nimrod Raphaeli, Radical Islamist Profiles, 3. Ayman Muhammad Rabi al Zawahiri: The Making of an Arch Terrorist (Berlin: Middle East Research Institute, 2003), 10.
24. “Declaration of Jihad Against the Country’s Tyrants” (“Al-Qaeda Training Manual”), n.d., 5. Recovered by police in Manchester, UK, in 1998, translated from Arabic to English, and presented as evidence in the trial of Richard Reid in 2003, the “Al-Qaeda Training Manual” is available at http://www.thetulsan.com/manual.html, accessed December 26, 2013.
26. Johannes J. G. Jansen, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat’s Assassins and Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East (London: Macmillan, 1986).
27. Quoted in Raphaeli, Radical Islamist Profiles, 10.
28. John Mackinlay, “Tackling bin Laden: Lessons from History,” Observer, October 28, 2001.
29. See John Mackinlay, The Insurgent Archipelago (London: Hurst, 2009), 1–8.
31. In fact, David Kilcullen and Montgomery McFate shared a writing platform in Anthropology Today, defending themselves and the role of anthropologists in facilitating the writing of FM 3-24, whom Roberto González had attacked for allegedly allowing themselves to become tools of “US imperial power” (“Towards Mercenary Anthropology? The New US Army Counterinsurgency Manual FM 3-24 and the Military Anthropology Complex,” Anthropology Today 23, no. 3 [2007]: 17; see also David Kilcullen, “Ethics, Politics, and Non-state Warfare,” Anthropology Today 23, no. 3 (2007): 20, and Montgomery McFate, “Building Bridges or Burning Heretics,” Anthropology Today 23, no. 3 [2007]: 21).
33. David Kilcullen, “Counterinsurgency Redux,” Survival 48, no. 4 (2006): 111, 112.
34. US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 8.
35. Sarah Sewall, “Introduction to the University of Chicago Press Edition: A Radical Field Manual,” in US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, xlii.
37. Frank Hoffman, “Neo-classical Insurgency?” Parameters 37, no. 2 (2007): 71.
39. David Betz, “Redesigning Land Forces for ‘Wars Amongst the People,’ ” Contemporary Security Policy 28, no. 2 (2007): 225.
40. Hoffman, “Neo-classical Insurgency?” 71.
41. Quoted in Montgomery McFate, “Iraq: The Social Context of IEDs,” Military Review, May–June 2005, 40.
42. See, for example, US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 11–15.
43. Hoffman, “Neo-classical Insurgency?” 71.
44. Steven Metz, Rethinking Insurgency (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2007), 36.
45. Robert Taber, War of the Flea: The Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare (New York: L. Stuart, 1965).
46. For a counterpoint to Steven Metz, see Lt. Col. Robert M. Cassidy, “The British Army and Counterinsurgency: The Salience of Military Culture,” Military Review, May–June 2005, 56.
47. For an assessment of David Galula and his influence on COIN thinking, see Douglas Porch, “David Galula and the Revival of COIN in the US Military,” in Celeste Ward Gventer, David Martin Jones, and M. L. R. Smith, eds., The New Counter-Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 173–98.
48. See Christopher Cradock and M. L. R. Smith, “ ‘No Fixed Values’: A Reinterpretation of the Influence of the Theory of Guerre Révolutionnaire and the Battle of Algiers, 1956–1957,” Journal of Cold War Studies 9, no. 4 (2007): 68–105.
49. See Jameel Jaffar and Amrit Singh, Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
50. See, for example, John Mackinlay’s discussion of Britain’s uncertain domestic counterterrorist/counterinsurgency policy after 9/11 in The Insurgent Archipelago, 117–219.
51. David Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency,” Journal of Strategic Studies 28, no. 4 (2005): 609.
53. See Mackinlay, The Insurgent Archipelago, 77–121.
54. Hoffman, “Neo-classical Insurgency?” 77.
55. US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 25, 26.
56. Richard Jackson, “An Analysis of EU Counterterrorism Discourse Post–September 11,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 20, no. 2 (2007): 243.
57. Hoffman, “Neo-classical Insurgency?” 78. It would be more accurate to say the jihadist aspires to something founded in the seventh century.
58. David Kilcullen, “Subversion and Counter Subversion in the Campaign Against Terrorism in Europe,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30, no. 8 (2007): 649, 652.
59. Quoted in George Packer, “Knowing the Enemy: Can Social Scientists Redefine the ‘War on Terror’?” New Yorker, December 18, 2006.
60. See in this context Barry Cooper, New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism (Columbia: Missouri University Press, 2004).
61. See Mackinlay, The Insurgent Archipelago, 5.
62. KCL Insurgency Group, “Reviewing UK Army Countering Insurgency,” meeting, King’s College London, June 20, 2007, notes taken by the group’s chair and circulated internally.
63. Raymond Aron, On War: Atomic Weapons and Global Diplomacy, trans. Terence Kilmartin (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), 63.
64. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 87–88.
66. John Mackinlay, for instance, believes Clausewitz embodies this concern with interstate war; he suggested in 2001 that the “coalition of likeminded states to ‘wage the War on Terrorism’ is an old-fashioned emergency structure that would address a Clausewitzian threat to security” (“Tackling bin Laden”). Again, this interpretation is erroneous. Clausewitz never wrote about what constituted “threats to security,” and to the extent that it is possible to discern a Clausewitzian understanding of threat, it is one that arises from the complex social and political conditions of individual societies—that is, the source of all war. Therefore, Mackinlay’s statement is a tautology.
67. Jan Willem Honig, “Strategy in a Post-Clausewitzian Setting,” in Gerd de Nooy, ed., The Clausewitzian Dictum and the Future of Western Military Strategy (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1997), 110.
68. Kilcullen, “Counterinsurgency Redux,” 116, emphasis in original.
69. Honig, “Strategy in a Post-Clausewitzian Setting,” 118.
70. Lawrence Freedman, “Globalisation and the War Against Terrorism,” in Christopher Ankerson, ed., Understanding Global Terror (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007), 227.
71. Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency,” 606, 605.
72. John Mackinlay, Globalisation and Insurgency, Adelphi Paper no. 352 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies and Oxford University Press, 2002), 33.
73. Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency,” 611–12.
74. US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 54.
75. Mackinlay, “Tackling bin Laden.”
76. See, for example, Cooper, New Political Religions, 147, as well as Samuel L. Berger and Mona Sutphen, “Commandeering the Palestinian Cause: Bin Laden’s Belated Concern,” in James F. Hoge and Gideon Rose, eds., How Did This Happen? Terrorism and the New War (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), 123.
77. Mackinlay, “Tackling bin Laden.”
78. Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency,” 612.
79. Richard Jackson, “Security, Democracy, and the Rhetoric of Counter-Terrorism,” Democracy and Security 1, no. 2 (2005): 152.
80. Paul Rogers, Global Security and the War on Terror: Elite Power and the Illusion of Control (London: Routledge, 2008), 82, 99.
81. Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, “The Terrorist Subject: Terrorism Studies and the Absent Subjectivity,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 1, no. 1 (2008): 33.
82. Ken Booth, “The Human Faces of Terror: Reflections in a Cracked Looking-Glass,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 1, no. 1 (2008): 75.
83. Barkawi and Laffey, “The Post-colonial Moment in Security Studies,” 329. See also Taraq Barkawi, “On the Pedagogy of ‘Small Wars,’ ” International Affairs 80, no. 1 (2004): 28.
84. Rogers, Global Security and the War on Terror, 33.
85. Mackinlay, “Tackling bin Laden.”
86. Freedman, “Globalisation and the War Against Terrorism,” 227.
87. Sewall, “Introduction to the University of Chicago Press Edition,” xlii.
88. Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency,” 609.
89. “Full Text of MI5 Director-General’s Speech,” Daily Telegraph, November 5, 2007.
90. See John Naughton, “Stephen Pinker: Fighting Talk from the Prophet of Peace,” Observer, October 15, 2011.
91. See, for example, Anthony Glees and Chris Pope, When Students Turn to Terror: Terrorist and Extremist Activity on British University Campuses (London: Social Affairs Unit, 2005).
92. Peter Clarke, Learning from Experience: Counter-Terrorism in the UK Since 9/11, Colin Cramphorn Memorial Lecture (London: Policy Exchange, 2007), 18.
93. See Jonathan Sacks, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society (London: Continuum, 2008). Mackinlay also recognizes this point in The Insurgent Archipelago, 199.
94. See Thomas Harding, “Public Support for Afghanistan Is Vital,” Daily Telegraph, November 13, 2008; Michael Evans, “Army Chief Predicts a ‘Generation of Conflict,’ ” London Times, August 28, 2007.
95. Clausewitz, On War, 88–89.
5. The Illusion of Tradition: Myths and Paradoxes of British Counterinsurgency
1. Sarah Sewall, “Introduction to the University of Chicago Press Edition: A Radical Field Manual,” in The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), xxiv.
3. As summarized in Ian F. W. Beckett, “British Counter-Insurgency: A Historical Reflection,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23, nos. 4–5 (2012): 783.
4. British Army, Countering Insurgency, vol. 1, part 10 (Warminster, UK: Ministry of Defence, 2009).
5. Raul Girardet, Mythes et mythologies politiques (Paris: Éditions de Seuil: 1986), 17.
6. British Army, Army Field Manual, IV-1.
7. Ibid., VI-10 to VI-17. See Charles Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1896; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and Bison Books, 1996); Charles Gwynn, Notes on Imperial Policing (London: Macmillan, 1934); and General John Dill, Notes on the Tactical Lessons of the Palestine Rebellion (London: War Office, 1937).
8. British Army, Army Field Manual, VI-20.
11. See, for example, Peter Lieb, “Suppressing Insurgencies in Comparison: The German in the Ukraine, 1918, and the British in Mesopotamia,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23, nos. 4–5 (2012): 628.
12. Frank Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 3, 16, 151, 5.
14. See, for example, David Anderson, History of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War and the End of Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005); Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005).
15. Numerous accounts by journalists, former soldiers, and academics retail the problems encountered by British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. See, for example, James Fergusson, A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (London: Bantam, 2008); Stephen Grey, Operation Snakebite (London: Penguin, 2009); Patrick Bury, Callsign Hades (London: Simon and Schuster, 2010); Jack Fairweather, A War of Choice: Honour, Hubris, and Sacrifice—the British in Iraq, 2003–9 (London: Vintage, 2012); Tim Bird and Alex Marshall, Afghanistan: How the West Lost Its Way (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Ben Anderson, No Worse Enemy: The Inside Story of the Chaotic Struggle for Afghanistan (London: Oneworld, 2011); Toby Harnden, Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Defining Story of Britain’s War in Afghanistan (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Sandy Gall, The War Against the Taliban: Why It All Went Wrong in Afghanistan (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). For the most penetrating scholarly dissection of leadership shortcomings in Iraq, see Huw Bennett, “The Reluctant Counter-Insurgents: Britain’s Absent Surge in Southern Iraq,” in Celeste Ward Gventer, David Martin Jones, and M. L. R. Smith, eds., The New Counter-Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 278–96.
16. See, for example, David Betz and Anthony Cormack, “Iraq, Afghanistan, and British Strategy,” Orbis 53, no. 2 (2009): 321.
17. British Army, Countering Insurgency, 1-4.
18. See Gwynn, Imperial Policing; Donald Featherstone, Colonial Small Wars, 1837–1901 (Newtown Abbott, UK: David and Charles, 1973).
19. David Ucko, “Innovation and Inertia? The US Military and the Learning of Counterinsurgency,” Orbis 52, no. 2 (2008): 291.
20. Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences from Malaya and Vietnam (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966), 50–62.
21. Julian Paget, Counter-Insurgency Campaigning (London: Faber, 1967).
22. Noel Barber, War of the Running Dogs: How Malaya Defeated the Communist Guerrillas (London: Collins, 1971).
23. Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, and Peacekeeping (London: Faber, 1971).
24. Frank Kitson, Bunch of Five (London: Faber, 1977).
25. John McGuffin, The Guinea Pigs (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1974).
26. See Frank Kitson, Gangs and Counter-Gangs (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1960).
27. Mark Urban, Big Boys Rules: The Secret Struggle Against the IRA (London: Faber, 1992), 35–39.
28. See Peter Neumann, Britain’s Long War: British Strategy in the Northern Ireland Conflict, 1969–98 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
29. John Bew, “Mass, Methods, and Means: The Northern Ireland ‘Model’ of Counter-Insurgency,” in Gventer, Jones, and Smith, The New Counter-Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective, 160.
30. Desmond Hamill, Pig in the Middle: The Army in Northern Ireland, 1969–1984 (London: Methuen, 1984), 159–223.
31. Chris Ryder, The RUC: A Force Under Fire (London: Methuen, 1989), 226–372.
32. See Colin McInnes, Hot War, Cold War: The British Army’s Way in Warfare, 1945–95 (London: Brassey’s, 1996).
33. Michael Dewar, Brush Fire Wars: Campaigns of the British Army Since 1945 (London: Robert Hale, 1984), esp. 180–85.
34. Thomas R. Mockaitis, British Counter-Insurgency, 1919–1990 (London: Macmillan, 1990).
35. Thomas R. Mockaitis, British Counter-Insurgency in the Post-imperial Era (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995), 12.
36. Douglas Porch, introduction to Callwell, Small Wars, v.
37. See British Army, Army Field Manual, IV-1.
39. John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 59–111.
40. Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, “Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq,” Military Review, January–February 2006, 2–11.
41. Montgomery McFate, “The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture,” Joint Forces Quarterly 38, 3rd quarter (2005): 42.
42. Quoted in Matthew B. Stannard, “Montgomery McFate’s Mission,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 29, 2007.
43. Montgomery McFate, “Iraq: The Social Context of IEDs,” Military Review, May–June 2005, 37–40; Montgomery McFate and Andrea V. Jackson, “An Organizational Solution for DOD’s Cultural Knowledge Needs,” Military Review, July–August 2005, 18.
44. Rod Thornton, “The British Army and the Origins of Its Philosophy of Minimum Force,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 15, no. 1 (2006): 85.
45. Rod Thornton, “ ‘Minimum Force’: A Reply to Huw Bennett,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 20, no. 1 (2009): 215.
46. British Army, Army Field Manual, 3-2.
47. UK House of Commons, Defence Committee, Iraq: An Initial Assessment of Post-conflict Operations, Sixth Report of Session 2004–2005, vol. 1 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 2005), 27–35.
48. Quoted in Richard Norton-Taylor, “General Hits Out at US Tactics,” Guardian, April 21, 2004.
49. Mike Jackson, “British Counter-Insurgency,” Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 3 (2009): 347.
50. Nigel Aylwin-Foster, “Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations,” Military Review, November–December 2005, 2–15.
52. UK House of Commons, Defence Committee, Iraq, 4.
55. For accounts of the U.S. experience in Fallujah, see Dick Camp, Operation Phantom Fury: The Assault and Capture of Fallujah, Iraq (Minneapolis: Zenith, 2009); David Bellavia, House to House: An Epic Memoir of War (London: Simon and Schuster, 2007); and Richard S. Lowry, New Dawn: The Battles for Fallujah (New York: Savas Beatie, 2010).
56. Aylwin-Foster, “Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations,” 4.
57. Davis, “UK Officer Slams US Iraq Tactics”; Richard Norton-Taylor and Jamie Wilson, “US Army in Iraq Institutionally Racist, Claims British Officer,” Guardian, January 12, 2006.
58. Quoted in Davis, “UK Officer Slams US Iraq Tactics.”
59. Thomas Waldman, “British ‘Post-conflict’ Operations: Into the Heart of Strategic Darkness,” Civil Wars 9, no. 1 (2007): 61–86.
60. On Northern Ireland, see, for example, Jack Holland and Susan Phoenix, Phoenix: Policing the Shadows. The Secret War Against Terrorism in Northern Ireland (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996); Sean O’Callaghan, The Informer (London: Corgi, 1998); Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA (London: Penguin, 2002); Henry Mc-Donald, Gunsmoke and Mirrors: How Sinn Féin Dressed Up Defeat as Victory (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2008).
61. Paul Dixon, “ ‘Hearts and Minds?’ British Counter-Insurgency from Malaya to Iraq,” Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 3 (2009): 366.
62. Karl Hack, “ ‘Iron Claws on Malaya’: The Historiography of the Malayan Emergency,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 30, no. 1 (1999): 102. See also Karl Hack, “The Malayan Emergency as Counter-Insurgency Paradigm,” Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 3 (2009): 383–414.
63. John Newsinger, British Counter-Insurgency: From Palestine to Northern Ireland (London: Palgrave, 2002).
64. Huw Bennett, “ ‘A Very Salutary Effect’: The Counter-Terror Strategy in the Early Malayan Emergency, June 1948 to December 1949,” Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 3 (2009): 415–44, and “Minimum Force in British Counterinsurgency,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 21, no. 3 (2010): 459–75; David French, The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945–1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
65. Huw Bennett, “Soldiers in the Court Room: The British Army’s Part in the Kenya Emergency Under the Legal Spotlight,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 5 (2011): 717–30.
66. Karl Hack identified “a herd mentality” in the denunciation of British COIN methods, exemplified in Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbons’s Imperial Endgame, which argued that Britain “self-consciously deployed ‘dirty wars’ and related tactics to shape a postcolonial world tied to the West and capitalism” (Imperial Endgame: Britain’s Dirty Wars and the End of Empire [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011], quoted in Karl Hack, “Everyone Lived in Fear: Malaya and the British War in Counter-Insurgency,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23, nos. 4–5 [2012]: 678).
67. Douglas Porch, “The Dangerous Myth and Dubious Promise of COIN,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 22, no. 2 (2011): 249.
68. Bruno Reis, “The Myth of British Minimum Force in Counterinsurgency Campaigns During Decolonisation (1945–1970),” Journal of Strategic Studies 34, no. 2 (2011): 245–79.
69. For example, see Frank Kitson’s principal work on the British Army, Warfare as a Whole (London: Faber, 1987). Only one chapter is dedicated to “activities outside the NATO area” (60–81), and even here no mention whatsoever is made of any predilection for counterinsurgency operations.
70. For one interpretation of such narrative changes, see Jonathan Gumz, “Reframing the Historical Problematic of Insurgency: How the Professional Military Literature Created a New History and Missed the Past,” Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 4 (2009): 553–88.
71. See, for example, Huw Bennett, “The Other Side of COIN: Minimum and Exemplary Force in British Army Counter-Insurgency in Kenya,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 18, no. 4 (2007): 638–64; Thornton, “ ‘Minimum Force’ ”; Reis, “The Myth of British Minimum Force.”
72. Daniel Whittingham, “ ‘Savage Warfare’: C. E. Callwell, the Roots of Counter-Insurgency, and the Nineteenth Century Context,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23, nos. 4–5 (2012): 592.
73. Callwell, Small Wars, 395, quoted in ibid., 594.
74. Whittingham, “ ‘Savage Warfare,’ ” 592.
75. Lieb, “Suppressing Insurgencies in Comparison,” 627–28.
76. David French, “Nasty Not Nice: British Counter-Insurgency Doctrine and Practice, 1945–1967,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23, nos. 4–5 (2012): 757.
77. Thomas R. Mockaitis, “The Minimum Force Debate: Contemporary Sensibilities Meet Imperial Practice,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23, nos. 4–5 (2012): 773, 774.
78. Matthew Hughes, “Introduction: British Ways of Counter-Insurgency, a Historical Perspective,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23, nos. 4–5 (2012): 581.
79. See Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars, 141, 163, 174.
80. Whittingham, “ ‘Savage Warfare,’ ” 592.
81. Quoted in ibid., 593.
82. Keith Surridge, “An Example to Be Followed or a Warning to Be Avoided? The British, Boers, and Guerrilla Warfare, 1900–1902,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23, nos. 4–5 (2012): 609.
83. Mockaitis, “The Minimum Force Debate,” 766.
84. British Army, Army Field Manual, 3-2.
85. See Hughes, “Introduction,” 585.
86. See, for example, John Terraine, The Smoke and the Fire: Myths and Anti-myths of War, 1861–1945 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1980); G. D. Sheffield, The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army (London: Aurum, 2011).
87. See James Pritchard and M. L. R. Smith, “Thompson in Helmand: Comparing Theory to Practice in British Counter-Insurgency Operations in Afghanistan,” Civil Wars 12, nos. 1–2 (2010): 65–90.
88. See Theo Farrell, “A Good War Gone Wrong?” RUSI Journal 156, no. 5 (2011): 60–64.
89. Surridge, “An Example to Be Followed or a Warning to Be Avoided?” 614, 622.
91. Lieb, “Suppression of Insurgencies in Comparison,” 637.
92. Hughes, “Introduction,” 586.
93. David Cesarani, “The War on Terror That Failed: British Counter-Insurgency in Palestine 1945–1947 and the ‘Farran Affair,’ ” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23, nos. 4–5 (2012): 663.
95. Dewar, Brush Fire Wars, 17–26.
96. In August 1946, British viceroy Archibald Wavell wrote home to the Labour government that British rule in India “was on the point of dissolution” (quoted in Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire [London: Penguin, 2007], 251).
97. For an assessment of the Aden campaign, see Jonathan Walker, Aden Insurgency: The Savage War in South Arabia 1962–1967 (Staplehurst, UK: Spellmount, 2005).
98. Dewar, Brush Fire Wars, 113–36.
99. For an assessment of Britain’s noninvolvement in Vietnam, see Stephen Benedict Dyson, “Alliances, Domestic Politics, and Leader Psychology: Why Did Britain Stay Out of Vietnam and Go Into Iraq?” Political Psychology 28, no. 6 (2007): 647–66.
101. For an account of the situation in Lebanon, see Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 443–92.
102. See Eric M. Hammel, The Root: The Marines in Beirut, August 1982–February 1984 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985).
104. Gian P. Gentile, “A Strategy Without Tactics: Population-centric COIN and the Army,” Parameters 39, no. 3 (2009): 5–6.
105. Dewar, Brush Fire Wars, 180.
107. For one notable account in this regard, see Andrew M. Dorman, Blair’s Successful War: British Military Intervention in Sierra Leone (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009).
108. Reis, “The Myth of British Minimum Force,” 274.
109. In this context of inventing tradition, see the classic study Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition: Essays on Invented Traditions Throughout the World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
110. Conal Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Engagements (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 26–27.
111. For a survey of such imperial actions, see John Dickie, The New Mandarins: How British Foreign Policy Works (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004); Christopher Meyer, Getting Our Way: 500 Years of Adventure and Intrigue. The Inside Story of British Diplomacy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009); Douglas Hurd, Choose Your Weapons: The British Foreign Secretary, Two Centuries of Conflict and Personalities (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010).
112. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 88.
113. Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars, 148.
114. Bew, “Mass, Methods, and Means,” 169.
6. The Puzzle of Counterinsurgency and Escalation
1. Brian Jenkins, Terrorism: A New Mode of Conflict (Los Angeles: Crescent, 1975), 1.
2. John Stone, “Escalation and the War on Terror,” Journal of Strategic Studies 35, no. 5 (2012): 639.
3. Herman Kahn, On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios (New York: Praeger, 1965), 3.
5. Stone, “Escalation and the War on Terror,” 639.
6. Thomas C. Schelling, Choice and Consequence: Perspectives of an Errant Economist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 268–90.
7. Lawrence Freedman, “Terrorism and Strategy,” in Lawrence Freedman, Christopher Hill, Adam Roberts, R. J. Vincent, Paul Wilkinson, and Philip Windsor, Terrorism and International Order (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 61.
8. See R. D. Crelinsten, “Terrorism as Political Communication: The Relationship Between the Controller and Controlled,” in Paul Wilkinson and A. M. Stewart, eds., Contemporary Research on Terrorism (Aberdeen, Scotland: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), 6–7.
9. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 87.
10. Christopher Bassford, “John Keegan and the Grand Tradition of Trashing Clausewitz: A Polemic,” War in History 1, no. 3 (1994): 329.
11. Clausewitz, On War, 88.
13. See Charles E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1896; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and Bison Books, 1996), 21–22.
14. John Shy and Thomas Collier, “Revolutionary War,” in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 817.
15. Ian F. W. Beckett, “The Tradition,” in John Pimlott, ed., Guerrilla Warfare (London: Bison Books, 1985), 8.
16. Francis Toase, introduction to Robin Corbett, ed., Guerrilla Warfare: From 1939 to the Present Day (London: Guild, 1986), 6.
17. K. J. Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), tables 2.1 and 2.2, 22–24. See also table 1 in Barbara F. Walter, “Designing Transitions from Civil War: Demobilization, Democratization, and Commitments to Peace,” International Security 25, no. 1 (1999): 128.
18. See Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (London: Macmillan, 1988), 71, as well as J. David Singer and Melvin Small, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816–1980 (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1982).
19. See Peter Janke, Guerrilla and Terrorist Organisations: A World Directory and Bibliography (Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1983). Janke identified the existence of 569 violent substate groupings.
20. W. Alexander Vacca and Mark Davidson, “The Regularity of Regular Warfare,” Parameters 41, no. 2 (2011): 18–28.
21. Richard Betts, “Should Strategic Studies Survive?” World Politics 50, no. 1 (1997): 7.
22. Harry Summers, “A War Is a War Is a War Is a War,” in Loren B. Thompson, ed., Low Intensity Conflict: The Pattern of Warfare in the Modern World (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989), 27–45.
23. M. L. R. Smith, “Guerrillas in the Mist: Reassessing Strategy and Low Intensity Warfare,” Review of International Studies 29, no. 1 (2003): 20–23.
26. See Colin Gray, The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–9.
27. Clausewitz, On War, 77.
28. Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1980), 5.
29. Clausewitz, On War, 77.
34. Isabelle Duyvesteyn, “The Escalation and De-escalation of Irregular War: Setting Out the Problem,” Journal of Strategic Studies 35, no. 5 (2012): 602.
35. Summarized in ibid., 604.
36. Stone, “Escalation and the War on Terror,” 641.
37. Richard Smoke, War: Controlling Escalation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 35.
38. Ernest Evans, Calling a Truce to Terror (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), 29.
39. J. Bowyer Bell, The Myth of the Guerrilla (New York: Knopf, 1971), 51–52.
40. Charles Russell, Leon Banker, and Bowman Miller, “Out-Inventing the Terrorist,” in Yonah Alexander, David Carlton, and Paul Wilkinson, eds., Terrorism: Theory and Practice (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1979), 12–13.
41. N. O. Berry, “Theories on the Efficacy of Terrorism,” in Wilkinson and Stewart, Contemporary Research on Terrorism, 293–305.
42. Peter Neumann and M. L. R. Smith, The Strategy of Terrorism: How It Works and Why It Fails (London: Routledge, 2008), 39–46.
44. Donald C. Hodges, Argentina’s Dirty War: An Intellectual History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 182.
45. Gen. Roberto Viola and Brig. Gen. L. A. Jáuregui, press conference, April 1977, quoted in Daniel Frontalini and María Cristana Caiati, El Mito de la guerra sucia (Buenos Aires: Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, 1984), 75.
46. M. L. R. Smith and Sophie Roberts, “War in the Gray: Exploring the Concept of Dirty War,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 31, no. 5 (2008): 385–87.
47. Paul H. Lewis, Guerrillas and Generals: Dirty War in Argentina (Greenwood, CT: Praeger, 2002), 147–57; Richard Gillespie, “A Critique of the Urban Guerrilla: Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil,” Conflict Quarterly, no. 1 (1980): 39–53.
48. Patricia Marchak, God’s Assassins: State Terrorism in Argentina in the 1970s (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1999), 112.
49. Quoted in Richard Gillespie, Soldiers of Peron: Argentina’s Montoneros (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 250.
50. Smith and Roberts, “War in the Gray,” 389.
51. Quoted in David Pion-Berlin and George A. Lopez, “Of Victims and Executioners: Argentine State Terror, 1975–1979,” International Studies Quarterly 35, no. 1 (1991): 70.
52. See, for example, Luis Martinez, The Algerian Civil War, 1990–1998 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); S. D. Selvadurai and M. L. R. Smith, “Black Tigers, Bronze Lotus: The Evolution and Dynamics of Sri Lanka’s Strategies of Dirty War,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 36, no. 7 (2013): 547–72.
53. Myles Shevlin, quoted in Gerard McKnight, The Mind of the Terrorist (London: Michael Joseph, 1974), 74.
54. A power-sharing arrangement as the long-term solution had been the British government’s policy position since early 1972. See Peter Neumann, Britain’s Long War: British Strategy in the Northern Ireland Conflict, 1969–1998 (London: Palgrave, 2003), 43–69.
55. See R. D. Crelinsten, “Analysing Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: A Communication Model,” Terrorism and Political Violence 14, no. 2 (2002): 77–122.
56. A phrase derived from Secretary of State for Northern Ireland William Whitelaw, who stated that the government’s objective was to reduce the violence to an “acceptable level” (quoted in J. Bowyer Bell, The Secret Army: The IRA [Dublin: Poolbeg, 1989], 384).
57. “Acceptable Level of Violence,” in A Glossary of Terms Related to the Conflict, Conflict and Politics in Northern Ireland Web Service, last updated July 2005, http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/othelem/glossary.htm, accessed May 15, 2014.
58. See James Salt and M. L. R. Smith, “Reassessing Military Assistance to the Civil Powers: Are Traditional British Anti-terrorist Responses Still Effective?” Low Intensity Conflict and Law Enforcement 13, no. 3 (2005): 227–49.
59. Paul Wilkinson, Terrorism and the Liberal State (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 3–22.
61. See Peter Taylor, Beating the Terrorists: Interrogation at Omagh, Gough, and Castlereagh (London: Penguin, 1980).
62. Walter Laqueur, “Terrorism—a Balance Sheet,” in Walter Laqueur, ed., The Terrorism Reader (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), 264.
63. The then IRA chief of staff quoted in Séan McStiofain, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Edinburgh: Cremonesi, 1975), 295.
64. M. L. R. Smith, Fighting for Ireland? The Military Strategy of the Irish Republican Movement (London: Routledge, 1995), 109–12.
66. Peter Chippindale, “Motorman’s Slow Drive,” Guardian, August 26, 1972.
67. See M. L. R. Smith and Peter R. Neumann, “Motorman’s Long Journey: Changing the Strategic Setting in Northern Ireland,” Contemporary British History 19, no. 4 (2005): 413–14.
68. David Martin Jones, M. L. R. Smith, and John Stone, “Counter-COIN: Counterinsurgency and the Preemption of Strategy,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 35, no. 9 (2012): 606–7.
69. See John Bew, “Mass, Methods, and Means: The Northern Ireland ‘Model’ of Counter-Insurgency,” in Celeste Ward Gventer, David Martin Jones, and M. L. R. Smith, eds., The New Counter-Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 165–66.
70. See John Newsinger, “From Counter-Insurgency to Internal Security: Northern Ireland, 1962–1992,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 6, no. 1 (1995): 88–111.
71. See UK Chief of the General Staff, Operation Banner: An Analysis of Military Operations in Northern Ireland, Army Code 71842 (London: Ministry of Defence, July 2006), 8-8-11, and Mark Urban, Big Boys Rules: The Secret Struggle Against the IRA (London: Faber, 1992).
72. See Nicholas Davies, Dead Men Talking (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2004), 11–42.
73. See, for example, Jack Holland and Susan Phoenix, Phoenix: Policing the Shadows. The Secret War Against Terrorism in Northern Ireland (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), 391–94; Allen Barker, Shadows: Inside Northern Ireland’s Special Branch (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2004); Martin Ingram and Greg Harkin, Stakeknife: Britain’s Secret Agents in Ireland (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2004), 255–64; and George Clark, Border Crossings: The Stories of the RUC Special Branch, the Garda Special Branch, and the IRA Moles (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2009), 184.
74. See, for example, Henry McDonald, Gunsmoke and Mirrors: How Sinn Féin Dressed Up Defeat as Victory (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2008).
75. See Crelinsten, “Terrorism as Political Communication.”
76. See Stephan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Complex (London: Bodley Head, 2008), 305–431.
77. Stone, “Escalation and the War on Terror,” 642.
79. Quoted in Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013), 20.
81. See Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013); Peter R. Mansoor, Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
82. See, for example, Mark Urban, Task Force Black: The Explosive True Story of the SAS and the Secret War in Iraq (London: Abacus, 2011), 259–78.
83. Ibid., 33–43, 163–76.
84. See, among other works, James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (New York: Free Press, 2007); Christopher H. Pyle, Getting Away with Torture: Secret Government, War Crimes, and Rule of Law (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2009); and Scahill, Dirty Wars.
85. Stone, “Escalation and the War on Terror,” 649.
86. M. L. R. Smith, “Quantum Strategy: The Interior World of War,” Infinity Journal 3, no. 1 (2012): 10–13.
87. Stone, “Escalation and the War on Terror,” 649.
88. Clausewitz, On War, 99.
90. For an exploration of this issue, see David Martin Jones and M. L. R. Smith, Sacred Violence: Political Religion in a Secular Age (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
91. Clausewitz, On War, 89.
Conclusion
1. Jeffrey H. Michaels and Matthew Ford, “Bandwagonistas: Rhetorical Re-description, Strategic Choice, and the Politics of Counter-Insurgency,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 22, no. 2 (2011): 352–84.
2. See, for example, Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
3. See David Martin Jones and M. L. R. Smith, “Grammar but No Logic: Technique Is Not Enough—a Reply to Nagl and Burton,” Journal of Strategic Studies 33, no. 3 (2010): 430–41.
4. John A. Nagl and Brian Burton, “Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Modern Wars—a Reply to Smith and Jones,” Journal of Strategic Studies 33, no. 1 (2010): 123–38.
5. Joshua Rovner, “Questions About COIN After Iraq and Afghanistan,” in Celeste Ward Gventer, David Martin Jones, and M. L. R. Smith, The New Counter-Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 299–318.
6. For example, Mark Urban’s study of Special Operations in Iraq notes General David Petraeus’s observation in 2006 that “the UK brings considerable assets to this [the fight against al-Qaeda in Baghdad] in the intelligence world and other areas.” These “other areas” were almost certainly a reference to the capacities of the Special Air Services, which were especially esteemed by the Americans. Later, in comments to the London Times in August 2008, Petraeus stated that the regiment “helped immensely in the Baghdad area, in particular to take down the al-Qaeda car bomb networks and other al-Qaeda operations in Iraq’s capital city, so they have done a phenomenal job … they have exceptional initiative, exceptional skill, exceptional courage and, I think, exceptional savvy. I can’t say enough about how impressive they are in thinking on their feet” (quoted in Mark Urban, Task Force Black: The Explosive True Story of the SAS and the Secret War in Iraq [London: Abacus, 2011], 218, 274).
7. Quoted in Decca Aitkenhead, “Rory Stewart: ‘The Secret of Modern Britain Is That There Is No Power Anywhere,’ ” Guardian, January 3, 2014.