By Mark Stout Carl von Clausewitz offered his “paradoxical trinity” as a tool for thinking about wars and their various manifestations. His trinity was: Composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free…
Category: Warfare
21st Century Crusaders: Americans who Volunteer to Fight ISIS with the Peshmerga
“One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half.” -Winston Churchill, 1940 When I first started reading about these brave men…
Military History: The Hürtgen Forest: America’s Longest, Most Costly Battle During World War II
At the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest, over 4,500 American troops were killed and wounded — and for the cost, very little ground was gained. Many have never heard of the Hürtgen Forest, much less the bloody battle that took place there 71 years ago. Located in western Germany between the Ruhr River and the…
Cartel Corner #20: Infighting within Los Zetas Cartel, Mexican Military Boast “There are No Cartels in Michoacan”
CIUDAD VICTORIA, Tamaulipas — The recent execution of a top athlete at the state university in this city points to the ongoing fighting between rival factions of the Mexican Los Zetas drug cartel. Tamaulipas is the Mexican state immediately south of Texas’ Rio Grande Valley and Laredo Sectors. On Monday evening, a group of unknown…
Can the Counter-Insurgency Doctrine Be Saved?
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…
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: The ‘Other’ Revolutionary War & The Fall of Fort Sackville
By John Farnam “… in the event of Great Britain attempting to force unjust laws upon us by strength of arms, our Cause we leave to Heaven, and our rifles!” ~ Hanover Association, Lancaster County, PA, 1774 During the French and Indian Wars of the 1750s and 1760s, many North American Indian tribes had allied…
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…
Colombian Mercs in Yemen?
The Arabian Dream: Colombians Taking Part in Yemen War Some 800 former Colombian military troops will enter the city port of Aden in Yemen, switching the jungle terrain of their home country for the deserts of Arabia. The former Colombian army troops will join a coalition of allied international troops fighting Shiite rebels. They will operate under…
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…