Suggestions for Small Wars Essay Contest?

[Mike Innes]

Hi folks, just getting started here at SWC after following it for quite some time. Bear with me, I've scanned over the previous 30-odd posts in this thread, and seen nothing explicitly related to the role of terrain, broadly speaking, in small wars.

I'm pandering to my own limited expertise here, but as an outgrowth of writing about sanctuary in insurgent and terrorist thought and practice, I've been building a conceptual suite that I've come to think of as "terrain complexity".

Right, the complexity part's not complicated, it means what it means, and gets into the role of networks, complex adaptive systems, and all the "unrecognizables" and incoherence of post-cold war low intensity crises. But the terrain angle is much more convoluted. Complex terrain might be just another word for "ecologies" or "environments", but I hesitate to go that route, thinking that it could be somewhat misleading to the lay, non-security types thinking more about maritime ecosystems and sustainable forests than the problems of CT/COIN battlespace and IPB, esp. in a global context.

Terrain, in this sense, is a weave of material/physical, human/demographic, and cognitive/social threads. It gets into rural vs. urban ops, hard vs. soft COIN, domestic vs. foreign theatres of operation, policing vs. military options, etc. Its ties into processes and conditions of radicalization (historically, not just in relation to today's Iraq and Afghanistan), cross-border migrations and transnational pipelines, etc. And, I think, the notion of terrain complexity underlies, so to speak, a great many of the suggestions that've already been put forward.

Anyway, just a thought.