SWJ is blogging now...

[SWCAdmin]

We're up and running on the SWJ Blog. Many thanks to Dave Kilcullen for kicking us off on the blog in style.

We have a great crew of contributors who have indicated their intent to blog with us. Our plan is for a consortium of high caliber folks who will blog as they are able, and as the mood strikes. So there should be a decent flow of good stuff, even though most individuals won't be posting maniacally. All of them are hugely busy, as they are out practicing and advancing the profession, not just spouting or engaged as talking heads. We very much look forward to their participation as the community continues to develop here at SWJ.

The blog requires a TypeKey registration to comment, and we've updated our privacy policy with info on that. Or just try to comment, and you'll be led to the registration.

For our SWC members -- unfortunately, it was beyond our immediate technical scope to integrate the Small Wars Council username with the blogging stuff. But TypeKey is first rate, and should be useful to you throughout the blogosphere. It should be an easy double tap.

[SWJED]

A Framework for Thinking About Iraq Strategy by Dave Kilcullen.

The President’s new Iraq strategy has prompted much discussion, informed and otherwise. I’m not going to add to it here. Rather, I want to tentatively suggest a framework for thinking about Iraq, which (if you accept its underlying assumptions) might prove helpful in evaluating the new strategy and the enemy’s likely response.

I developed this framework about two years ago, while writing the October 2004 version of Countering Global Insurgency, mainly the appendix on Iraq. I have since presented it in various forums, including during the Quadrennial Defense Review in 2004-5, the Eisenhower Series in early 2006, during a series of lectures at the Naval War College and at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, and during the Irregular Warfare conference in Summer 2006. I also briefed it to the Pentagon’s “Plan B” team in November 2006...

Remember, Remember, the 5th of November by Bruce Gudmundsson.

One of my favorite public speaking techniques, which I probably borrowed from Paul Harvey's "The Rest of the Story", is to tell an obscure story as if it were a familiar one. Thus, when I want to introduce an audience to the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, I start by talking about the "great civil war of the mid-nineteenth century, where the Northerners wore blue and the Southerners wore grey ..."

A couple of years ago, while giving an after-dinner talk to a group of dentists in Manhattan, I used this technique to introduce the subject of terrorism. I told the story of a man who had a career that was remarkably similar to that of Osama bin Ladin. The subject of the story, however, was not a present-day Saudi terrorist, but an English contemporary of William Shakespeare by the name of Guy Fawkes...