After failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s time for a new understanding of counterinsurgency. With the apparent lack of progress and success in Afghanistan and Iraq, counterinsurgency (COIN) has fallen out of favor within the political and military establishments in the U.S. and elsewhere. Regardless of whether these failures were due to erroneous implementation or…
Category: Military History
Understanding Counter-Insurgency Warfare in under 3 minutes
This clip was edited out of the final movie We Were Soldiers for some reason, but I have to agree with Tom Ricks’ Article, they should have left it in. “You Won’t Run the little Bastards back home sir, They Are Home….” As I Said, that sums up COIN.
Military History: A Lot of What We Think We Know about World War II is Wrong
New Book Challenges Conventional Wisdom By James Holland The Second World War remains an enduringly fascinating subject, but despite the large number of films, documentaries, books and even comics on the subject, our understanding of this catastrophic conflict, even seven decades on, remains heavily dependent on conventional wisdom, propaganda and an interpretation skewed by the…
Cold War Files: The Third World War that Almost Was in 1950
With the comfort and hindsight of a half-century, President Harry Truman’s decision to commit American power to save South Korea from Communist aggression in late June 1950 stands as perhaps America’s finest moment of the Cold War. By making a difficult commitment, by sacrificing 50,000 American lives in the end, Truman upheld Western values…
Knowing Your Enemy: Mujahideen, The Strategic Tradition of Sunni Jihadism
By Brett A. Friedman The world is in the grips of the group known as ISIS. Unable to look away but equally unable to fathom the group’s extreme violence, the civilized world marvels at a terrorist threat that is seemingly al Qaeda cranked up to eleven. Its media blitzkrieg has recently been described by Jessica…
Is the U.S. Military Strong Enough?
This 4 Minute Video is worth a watch. Simple, Sobering and to the Point.
10 Things you Probably Never Knew about Apocalypse Now
10 obscure facts about “Apocalypse Now.” I’ll never forget the first time I saw “Apocalypse Now.” Captivated, I stared at the screen for the 196-minute runtime as Willard journeyed upriver in the midst of the Vietnam War to assassinate the general-turned-rogue-demigod Colonel Kurtz. Afterward, I felt disgusted, exhausted, relieved, and forever altered in my…
The Ignorance of Intelligence Agencies
This is a very short article, but worthy of your time nonetheless. It points out one of the glaring inadequacies of the current state of our Foreign Intelligence apparatus in this country. All of the sentences in italics are of my doing for emphasis on these points. -SF By Williamson Murray At the start of…
Why the Russians Cannot be Defeated
Although I can’t say I agree completely with the title of this article,the majority of it is a really good read for the CO. Russia would be a very tough foe for the U.S. in a Conventional War, no doubt, but, with like all of our enemies, it is good to understand their mentality and…
History of Guerilla Warfare: How Would Lawrence of Arabia Defeat ISIS?
Lessons from the Early 20th century for the Chaotic, Modern Middle East By James Stavridis A Colleague of mine recently watched the Oscar-winning classic 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. His brief comment on its merits in regard to understanding the Middle East of today: a cynical shrug of his shoulders and the words “nothing has…