Modernization/Development Theory, CORDS, and FM 3-24?

[Madhu]

....it's writing things up that I don't like very much. For all the fun I tend to make of "writing up papers instead of doing the hard thinking first", I actually respect scholarly research of value.

Hard Hearts and Open Minds? Governance, Identity and the Intellectual Foundations of Counterinsurgency Strategy, The Journal of Strategic Studies, 2008 M Fitzsimmons

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/1...024692#preview

The 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of "modernization theory" in western academic and policy communities (also known as "political development theory"), a theory of development that emphasized a teleological convergence of societies through several stages of modernization from primitive "traditional" forms toward western style industrialization, secularization, and political pluralism. Legitimacy in this framework was earned by whoever could most reliably guide the society along these hypothesized paths of modernization, with their characteristic signals of good overnance - economic growth, political representation and efficient administrations.

From Counterinsurgency by David Kilcullen (page 21)

The RAND corporation established an Insurgency Board that brought together external researchers, along with RAND analysts, to examine the new environment through the lens of RAND's work on counterinsurgency since the 1950s. In some ways, RAND acted as an institutional memory bank for the new counterinsurgency movmement, in part because some veteran researchers, Steve Hosmer among them, had been present at the creation - in the 1950s, when RAND had played a crucial early role in developing classical counterinsurgency theory.

I started reading about all of this about 2009 on Abu Muqawama's blog. The comments section there sometimes spiralled out of control and the conversation on this topic became very bad-tempered at times. I do not wish to recreate those feelings and I have no interest in playing intellectual "gotcha." I simply want to learn. I don't regret that I was critical on that board, but the tone that I sometimes took was terrible.