Lifting the Fog of Peace

Lifting the Fog of Peace
Author: Janine Davidson
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2011-08-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472034820

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How military organizations trained for conventional war adapt—or fail to adapt—to nontraditional missions

Dying to Learn

Dying to Learn
Author: Michael A. Hunzeker
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2021-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501758470

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In Dying to Learn, Michael Hunzeker develops a novel theory to explain how wartime militaries learn. He focuses on the Western Front, which witnessed three great-power armies struggle to cope with deadlock throughout the First World War, as the British, French, and German armies all pursued the same solutions-assault tactics, combined arms, and elastic defense in depth. By the end of the war, only the German army managed to develop and implement a set of revolutionary offensive, defensive, and combined arms doctrines that in hindsight represented the best way to fight. Hunzeker identifies three organizational variables that determine how fighting militaries generate new ideas, distinguish good ones from bad ones, and implement the best of them across the entire organization. These factors are: the degree to which leadership delegates authority on the battlefield; how effectively the organization retains control over soldier and officer training; and whether or not the military possesses an independent doctrinal assessment mechanism. Through careful study of the British, French, and German experiences in the First World War, Dying to Learn provides a model that shows how a resolute focus on analysis, command, and training can help prepare modern militaries for adapting amidst high-intensity warfare in an age of revolutionary technological change.

Peace Works

Peace Works
Author: Frederick D. Barton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2018-04-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1538113015

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Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria - a quarter-century of stumbles in America’s pursuit of a more peaceful and just world. American military interventions have cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars, yet we rarely manage to enact positive and sustainable change. In Peace Works: America's Unifying Role in a Turbulent World, ambassador and global conflict leader Rick Barton uses a mix of stories, history, and analysis for a transformative approach to foreign affairs and offers concrete and attainable solutions for the future. Drawing on his lifetime of experience as a diplomat, foreign policy expert, and State Department advisor, Rick Barton grapples with the fact that the U.S. is strategically positioned and morally obligated to defuse international conflicts, but often inadvertently escalates conflicts instead. Guided by the need to find solutions that will yield tangible results, Barton does a deep analysis of our last several interventions and discusses why they failed and how they could have succeeded. He outlines a few key directives in his foreign policy strategy: remain transparent with the American public, act as a catalyzing (not colonizing!) force, and engage local partners. But above all else, he insists that the U.S. must maintain a focus on people. Since a country’s greatest resource is often the ingenuity of its local citizens, it is counterproductive to ignore them while planning an intervention. By anchoring each chapter to a story from a specific conflict zone, Barton is able to discuss opportunities pursued and missed, areas for improvement, and policy recommendations. This balance between storytelling and concrete policy suggestions both humanizes distant stories of foreign crises, and provides going-forward solutions for desperate situations. The book begins and ends in Syria – the ultimate failure of our current approach to foreign policy, and with devastating consequences.

Counterinsurgency

Counterinsurgency
Author: David Kilcullen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2010-05-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0199746257

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David Kilcullen is one of the world's most influential experts on counterinsurgency and modern warfare, a ground-breaking theorist whose ideas "are revolutionizing military thinking throughout the west" (Washington Post). Indeed, his vision of modern warfare powerfully influenced the United States' decision to rethink its military strategy in Iraq and implement "the Surge," now recognized as a dramatic success. In Counterinsurgency, Kilcullen brings together his most salient writings on this vitally important topic. Here is a picture of modern warfare by someone who has had his boots on the ground in some of today's worst trouble spots-including Iraq and Afghanistan-and who has been studying counterinsurgency since 1985. Filled with down-to-earth, common-sense insights, this book is the definitive account of counterinsurgency, indispensable for all those interested in making sense of our world in an age of terror.

Dirty Wars

Dirty Wars
Author: Dr Simon Robbins
Publisher: The History Press
Total Pages: 644
Release: 2016-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0752479016

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'Who is the enemy?' This is the question most asked in modern warfare; gone are the set-piece conventional battles of the past. Once seen as secondary to more traditional conflicts, irregular warfare (as modified and refashioned since the 1990s) now presents a major challenge to the state and the bureaucratic institutions which have dominated the twentieth century, and to the politicians and civil servants who formulate policy. Twenty-first-century conflict is dominated by counterinsurgency operations, where the enemy is almost indistinguishable from innocent civilians. Battles are gunfights in jungles, deserts and streets; winning 'hearts and minds' is as important as holding territory. From struggles in South Africa, the Philippines and Ireland to operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya, this book covers the strategy and doctrine of counterinsurgency, and the factors which ensure whether such operations are successful or not. Recent ignorance of central principles and the emergence of social media, which has shifted the odds in favour of the insurgent, have too often resulted in failure, leaving governments and their security forces embedded in a hostile population, immersed in costly and dangerous nation-building.

Transforming US Intelligence for Irregular War

Transforming US Intelligence for Irregular War
Author: Richard H. Shultz Jr.
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1626167656

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When Joint Special Operations Command deployed Task Force 714 to Iraq in 2003, it faced an adversary unlike any it had previously encountered: al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). AQI’s organization into multiple, independent networks and its application of Information Age technologies allowed it to wage war across a vast landscape. To meet this unique threat, TF 714 developed the intelligence capacity to operate inside those networks, and in the words of commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, USA (Ret.) “claw the guts out of AQI.” In Transforming US Intelligence for Irregular War, Richard H. Shultz Jr. provides a broad discussion of the role of intelligence in combatting nonstate militants and revisits this moment of innovation during the Iraq War, showing how the defense and intelligence communities can adapt to new and evolving foes. Shultz tells the story of how TF 714 partnered with US intelligence agencies to dismantle AQI’s secret networks by eliminating many of its key leaders. He also reveals how TF 714 altered its methods and practices of intelligence collection, intelligence analysis, and covert paramilitary operations to suppress AQI’s growing insurgency and, ultimately, destroy its networked infrastructure. TF 714 remains an exemplar of successful organizational learning and adaptation in the midst of modern warfare. By examining its innovations, Shultz makes a compelling case for intelligence leading the way in future campaigns against nonstate armed groups.

The Fog of Peace

The Fog of Peace
Author: Jean-Marie Guehenno
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2015-05-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0815726317

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No small number of books laud and record the heroic actions of those at war. But the peacekeepers? Who tells their stories? At the beginning of the 1990s, the world exited the cold war and entered an era of great promise for peace and security. Guided by an invigorated United Nations, the international community set out to end conflicts that had flared into vicious civil wars and to unconditionally champion human rights and hold abusers responsible. The stage seemed set for greatness. Today that optimism is shattered. The failure of international engagement in conflict areas ranging from Afghanistan to Congo and Lebanon to Kosovo has turned believers into skeptics. The Fog of Peace is a firsthand reckoning by Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the man who led UN peacekeeping efforts for eight years and has been at the center of all the major crises since the beginning of the 21st century. Guéhenno grapples with the distance between the international community's promise to protect and the reality that our noble aspirations may be beyond our grasp. The author illustrates with personal, concrete examples—from the crises in Afghanistan, Iraq, Congo, Sudan, Darfur, Kosovo, Ivory Coast, Georgia, Lebanon, Haiti, and Syria—the need to accept imperfect outcomes and compromises. He argues that nothing is more damaging than excessive ambition followed by precipitous retrenchment. We can indeed save many thousands of lives, but we need to calibrate our ambitions and stay the course.

The Test of Terrorism

The Test of Terrorism
Author: Alastair Finlan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 103
Release: 2016-01-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317653378

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This book offers a timely and critical reflection on how states have responded to the test of terrorism in the long shadow of 9/11. Terrorism has become the hallmark of international relations in the early twenty-first century. This book provides a policy-focused analysis of how certain states have responded to its test by employing a range of viewpoints that encompass state level responses down to a close interrogation of the nebulous non-state actors who have orchestrated spectacular political violence in contemporary times. It engages with the challenges of terrorism from a variety of perspectives that include philosophical discourses, the perils of counterterrorism encapsulated in the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, learning in counterinsurgency, the effectiveness of counterterrorism spending, Al Qaeda’s modus operandi and the threat posed by Boko Haram to Nigeria. This eclectic collection of chapters is an important contribution to the wide-ranging and contested debate about terrorism that has dominated the political discourse in the West since 2001. This book was published as a special issue of Defense and Security Analysis.

Other People's Wars

Other People's Wars
Author: Brent L. Sterling
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2021-03-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1647120616

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Case studies explore how to improve military adaptation and preparedness in peacetime by investigating foreign wars Preparing for the next war at an unknown date against an undetermined opponent is a difficult undertaking with extremely high stakes. Even the most detailed exercises and wargames do not truly simulate combat and the fog of war. Thus, outside of their own combat, militaries have studied foreign wars as a valuable source of battlefield information. The effectiveness of this learning process, however, has rarely been evaluated across different periods and contexts. Through a series of in-depth case studies of the US Army, Navy, and Air Force, Brent L. Sterling creates a better understanding of the dynamics of learning from “other people’s wars,” determining what types of knowledge can be gained from foreign wars, identifying common pitfalls, and proposing solutions to maximize the benefits for doctrine, organization, training, and equipment. Other People’s Wars explores major US efforts involving direct observation missions and post-conflict investigations at key junctures for the US armed forces: the Crimean War (1854–56), Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), Spanish Civil War (1936–39), and Yom Kippur War (1973), which preceded the US Civil War, First and Second World Wars, and major army and air force reforms of the 1970s, respectively. The case studies identify learning pitfalls but also show that initiatives to learn from other nations’ wars can yield significant benefits if the right conditions are met. Sterling puts forth a process that emphasizes comprehensive qualitative learning to foster better military preparedness and adaptability.

UN Peacekeeping Doctrine in a New Era

UN Peacekeeping Doctrine in a New Era
Author: Cedric de Coning
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2017-02-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1315396920

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This edited volume offers a thorough review of peacekeeping theory and reality in contemporary contexts, and aligns the two to help inform practice. Recent UN peacekeeping operations have challenged the traditional peacekeeping principles of consent, impartiality and the minimum use of force. The pace and scope of these changes have now reached a tipping point, as the new mandates are fundamentally challenging the continued validity of the UN peacekeeping’s core principles and identity. In response the volume analyses the growing gap between these actual practices and existing UN peacekeeping doctrine, exploring how it undermines the effectiveness of UN operations, and endangers lives, arguing that a common doctrine is a critical starting point for effective multi-national operations. In order to determine the degree to which this general principle applies to the current state of UN peacekeeping, this book: Provides a review of conceptual and doctrinal developments in UN peacekeeping operations through a historical perspective Examines the debate related to peace operations doctrine and concepts among key Member States Focuses on the actual practice of peacekeeping by conducting case studies of several UN peacekeeping missions in order to identify gaps between practice and doctrine Critically analyses gaps between emerging peacekeeping practice and existing doctrine Recommends that the UN moves beyond the peacekeeping principles and doctrine of the past Combining empirical case-based studies on UN peace operations, with studies on the views and policies of key UN Security Council members that generate these mandates, and views of key contributors of UN peacekeepers, this volume will be of great use to policy-makers; UN officials and peace operations practitioners; and academics working on peace and conflict/security studies, international organizations and conflict management.