Quote Originally Posted by MikeF View Post
I think I'm gonna start calling this post-colonial small wars.
Post-colonial, yes, but "post Cold War" is also appropriate. The prominent insurgencies of the second half of the 20th century may have been primarily driven by opposition to colonial powers and postcolonial dictatorships, but our response to them was driven primarily by our own "communists vs capitalists" stategic equation. Our tendency to impose the latter paradigm over the fiormer often led us to surrender the moral high ground of opposition to antiquated, abusive, and crumbling power structures to our opponents, which really didn't do us any good.

Certainly there are useful lessons to be learned from the Cold War insurgencies, but we also have to recognize that many of today's conflicts are very different, and not all the lessons apply. There's a danger, for example, in trying to apply COIN principles to a conflict against a group like AQ, which is not an insurgency at all, or to a situation that is less an insurgency than an armed competition for control of an ungoverned space.