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19 January SWJ Blog - Don't Confuse the "Surge" with the Strategy by Dave Kilcullen.
Quote:
Much discussion of the new Iraq strategy centers on the “surge” to increase forces in-theater by 21,500 troops. I offer no comment on administration policy here. But as counterinsurgency professionals, it should be clear to us that focusing on the “surge” misses what is actually new in the strategy – its population-centric approach....
Spilling Soup on Myself in Al Anbar - John Nagl, Small Wars Journal.
Quote:
I thought I understood something about counterinsurgency until I started doing it. In this interview conducted by the Army's Combat Studies Institute, I discuss what I learned the first time I practiced counterinsurgency, in Al Anbar province from 2003-2004. I'd be happy to discuss the interview, the new Army/Marine Corps "Counterinsurgency" Field Manual, or other topics of interest via this blog when my day job commanding the 1st Battalion 34th Armor allows. Duty First!
Making Sense of Multi-Sided Conflict - Bruce Gudmundsson on the SWJ blog.
Please comment on the blog also... Submitting to RCP too..Quote:
If I were a snooty European intellectual, I would blame the inability of many Americans to recognize the multi-sided nature of the current war in Iraq on American culture. "Americans," I would write, "can only think in terms of black and white, of absolute good and absolute evil. If you doubt this, just look at the films they watch, the games they play and the politicians they elect."
Fortunately, I'm a snooty American intellectual. As such, I realise that three-sided conflicts have been a staple plot device in American films for more than thirty years, that games like Monopoly, Risk and poker provide America with lots of people who are familiar with the dynamics of multi-sided competition, and that nobody gets very far in American politics without being able to handle more shades of grey than a high-end laser printer. Moreover, as a snooty American intellectual who has spent a lot of time studying the military history of Europe, I also realize that the chief cause of our strategic myopia is an idea that we borrowed from European intellectuals, and that is the notion that war is necessarily a two-sided affair...
7 June SWJ Blog - Unwarranted Attack on Petraeus Aide by Jim Guirard.
Quote:
Diana West's holier-than-thou attack on Dr. David Kilcullen of Gen. David Petraeus' senior staff in Baghdad must be a delight to al Qaeda and Hizballah propagandists and anti-American brainwashers worldwide.
In a June 1, 2007 Washington Times essay entitled “Pay attention to jihad,” she slams the Australian-born anti-Terrorism strategist for an assertion several months ago that so-called "jihad" (holy war in the name of Allah, etc.) has assumed the stature of heroic "adventure" in the minds, hearts and souls of many young Muslims.
She distorts Kilcullen's words into the preposterous speculation that he approves of this development and asks whether if he had grown up in Hitler's Germany he “might have become a Nazi” -- when, in fact, the man and his fellow counterinsurgency (COIN) experts are attempting to discover an effective antidote for a highly seductive “Jihadi martyrdom” factor which is providing al Qaeda-style Terrorism with an endless supply of enthusiastic young suicide mass murderers...