When I began my professional career in the mid-aughts, counterinsurgency, or “COIN,” was beginning to supplant counterterrorism as the most important buzzword in Washington, DC. The steadily expanding civil war in Iraq and insurgency in Afghanistan—not to mention conflicts in other countries like Somalia—convinced foreign policy elites (and wannabe elites like me) that the United…
Tag: counterinsurgency
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 29 on Powell, France’s Wars in Chad
On 27 February 2023, French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech on the future of Franco-African relations. The proposed changes represented a fundamental reorientation of French activity on the continent, and would represent a major departure from French policy over the past 70 years. Among other changes, Macron pledged to drastically reduce France’s military presence,…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 14-8: Schrader, Badges Without Borders
Of the many significant achievements of Stuart Schrader’s excellent book Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing, one of the most substantive is that it asks readers to challenge a seemingly foundational geographic assumption underpinning diplomatic relations: the view that the foreign policy sphere is fundamentally distinct from the domestic one. In contrast,…
Roundtable 7-20 on Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency
In 2015 the United States faces a number of opportunities to intervene with military force in countries of secondary or even less strategic importance to U.S. policy makers. President Barack Obama’s completion of the withdrawal of American ground combat troops from Iraq, and plans to draw down U.S. troops from Afghanistan, have not reduced…
Review Essay 22 on Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War
Perhaps only Douglas Porch, with his encyclopedic knowledge of insurgency and counterinsurgency (COIN) and his broader military expertise, could have written this book. Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War is a magisterial examination across time and space of the history of COIN. It is intended to dispel the myths propagated around…
Article Review 15 on “Does Decapitation Work?” and “Targeting Top Terrorists”
Leadership targeting has become the cornerstone of American counterterrorism policy. Since 2004, the number of strikes carried out by unmanned aerial vehicles has increased dramatically. In 2010 alone the United States carried out 118 drones strikes, 70 in 2011, and 24 in the first six months of 2012.[1] In the past two months, the U.S….