Download or read book Democratic Counterinsurgents written by William Patterson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the ways in which democracies can win counterinsurgencies when they implement a proper strategy. At a time when the USA is retrenching from two bungled foreign wars that involved deadly insurgent uprisings, this is a particularly important argument. Succumbing to the trauma of those engagements and drawing the wrong conclusions about counterinsurgency can only lead to further defeat in the future. Rather than assuming that counterinsurgency is ineffective, it is crucial to understand that a conventional response to an insurgent challenge is likely to fail. Counterinsurgency must be applied from the beginning, and if done properly can be highly effective, even when used by democratic regimes. In fact, because such regimes are often wealthier; have more experience at institution-building and functional governance; are more pluralistic in nature and therefore enjoy higher levels of legitimacy than do autocracies, democracies may have considerable advantages in counterinsurgency warfare. Rather than give up in despair, democracies should learn to leverage these advantages and implement them against future insurgencies.
Download or read book Counterinsurgency Democracy and the Politics of Identity in India written by Mona Bhan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-11 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rhetoric of armed social welfare has become prominent in military and counterinsurgency circuits with profound consequences for the meanings of democracy, citizenship, and humanitarianism in conflict zones. By focusing on the border district of Kargil, the site of India and Pakistan’s fourth war in 1999, this book analyses how humanitarian policies of healing and heart warfare infused the logic of democracy and militarism in the post-war period. Compassion became a strategy to contain political dissension, regulate citizenship, and normalize the extensive militarization of Kargil’s social and political order. The book uses the power of ethnography to foreground people’s complex subjectivities and the violence of compassion, healing, and sacrifice in India’s disputed frontier state. Based on extensive research in several sites across the region, from border villages in Kargil to military bases and state offices in Ladakh and Kashmir, this engaging book presents new material on military-civil relations, the securitization of democracy and development, and the extensive militarization of everyday life and politics. It is of interest to scholars working in diverse fields including political anthropology, development, and Asian Studies.
Download or read book Bullets Not Ballots written by Jacqueline L. Hazelton and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-15 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Bullets Not Ballots, Jacqueline L. Hazelton challenges the claim that winning "hearts and minds" is critical to successful counterinsurgency campaigns. Good governance, this conventional wisdom holds, gains the besieged government popular support, denies support to the insurgency, and makes military victory possible. Hazelton argues that major counterinsurgent successes since World War II have resulted not through democratic reforms but rather through the use of military force against civilians and the co-optation of rival elites. Hazelton offers new analyses of five historical cases frequently held up as examples of the effectiveness of good governance in ending rebellions—the Malayan Emergency, the Greek Civil War, the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines, the Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and the Salvadoran Civil War—to show that, although unpalatable, it was really brutal repression and bribery that brought each conflict to an end. By showing how compellence works in intrastate conflicts, Bullets Not Ballots makes clear that whether or not the international community decides these human, moral, and material costs are acceptable, responsible policymaking requires recognizing the actual components of counterinsurgent success—and the limited influence that external powers have over the tactics of counterinsurgent elites.
Download or read book Modern Warfare written by Roger Trinquier and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 1964 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Counterinsurgency written by Douglas Porch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-11 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Controversial new history of counterinsurgency which challenges its claims as an effective strategy of waging war.
Download or read book Bullets Not Ballots written by Jacqueline L. Hazelton and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-15 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Bullets Not Ballots, Jacqueline L. Hazelton challenges the claim that winning "hearts and minds" is critical to successful counterinsurgency campaigns. Good governance, this conventional wisdom holds, gains the besieged government popular support, denies support to the insurgency, and makes military victory possible. Hazelton argues that major counterinsurgent successes since World War II have resulted not through democratic reforms but rather through the use of military force against civilians and the co-optation of rival elites. Hazelton offers new analyses of five historical cases frequently held up as examples of the effectiveness of good governance in ending rebellions—the Malayan Emergency, the Greek Civil War, the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines, the Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and the Salvadoran Civil War—to show that, although unpalatable, it was really brutal repression and bribery that brought each conflict to an end. By showing how compellence works in intrastate conflicts, Bullets Not Ballots makes clear that whether or not the international community decides these human, moral, and material costs are acceptable, responsible policymaking requires recognizing the actual components of counterinsurgent success—and the limited influence that external powers have over the tactics of counterinsurgent elites.
Download or read book Pathological Counterinsurgency written by Samuel R. Greene and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-06-29 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pathological Counterinsurgency critically examines the relationship between elections and counterinsurgency success in third party campaigns supported by the United States. From Vietnam to El Salvador to Iraq and Afghanistan, many policymakers and academics believed that democratization would drive increased legitimacy and improved performance in governments waging a counterinsurgency campaign. Elections were expected to help overcome existing deficiencies, thus allowing governments supported by the United States to win the “hearts and minds” of its populace, undermining the appeal of insurgency. However, in each of these cases, campaigning in and winning elections did not increase the legitimacy of the counterinsurgent government or alter conditions of entrenched rent seeking and weak institutions that made states allied to the United States vulnerable to insurgency. Ultimately, elections played a limited role in creating the conditions needed for counterinsurgency success. Instead, decisions of key actors in government and elites to prioritize either short term personal and political advantage or respect for political institutions held a central role in counterinsurgency success or failure. In each of the four cases in this study, elected governments pursued policies that benefited members of the government and elites at the expense of boarder legitimacy and improved performance. Expectations that democratization could serve as a key instrument of change led to unwarranted optimism about the likely of success and ultimately to flawed strategy. The United States continued to support regimes that continued to lack the legitimacy and government performance needed for victory in counterinsurgency.
Download or read book Shooting Up written by Vanda Felbab-Brown and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2009-12-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most policymakers see counterinsurgency and counternarcotics policy as two sides of the same coin. Stop the flow of drug money, the logic goes, and the insurgency will wither away. But the conventional wisdom is dangerously wrongheaded, as Vanda Felbab-Brown argues in Shooting Up. Counternarcotics campaigns, particularly those focused on eradication, typically fail to bankrupt belligerent groups that rely on the drug trade for financing. Worse, they actually strengthen insurgents by increasing their legitimacy and popular support. Felbab-Brown, a leading expert on drug interdiction efforts and counterinsurgency, draws on interviews and fieldwork in some of the world's most dangerous regions to explain how belligerent groups have become involved in drug trafficking and related activities, including kidnapping, extortion, and smuggling. Shooting Up shows vividly how powerful guerrilla and terrorist organizations — including Peru's Shining Path, the FARC and the paramilitaries in Colombia, and the Taliban in Afghanistan — have learned to exploit illicit markets. In addition, the author explores the interaction between insurgent groups and illicit economies in frequently overlooked settings, such as Northern Ireland, Turkey, and Burma. While aggressive efforts to suppress the drug trade typically backfire, Shooting Up shows that a laissez-faire policy toward illicit crop cultivation can reduce support for the belligerents and, critically, increase cooperation with government intelligence gathering. When combined with interdiction targeting major traffickers, this strategy gives policymakers a better chance of winning both the war against the insurgents and the war on drugs.
Download or read book Wrong Turn written by Gian Gentile and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A searing indictment of US strategy in Afghanistan from a distinguished military leader and West Point military historian—“A remarkable book” (National Review). In 2008, Col. Gian Gentile exposed a growing rift among military intellectuals with an article titled “Misreading the Surge Threatens U.S. Army’s Conventional Capabilities,” that appeared in World Politics Review. While the years of US strategy in Afghanistan had been dominated by the doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN), Gentile and a small group of dissident officers and defense analysts began to question the necessity and efficacy of COIN—essentially armed nation-building—in achieving the United States’ limited core policy objective in Afghanistan: the destruction of Al Qaeda. Drawing both on the author’s experiences as a combat battalion commander in the Iraq War and his research into the application of counterinsurgency in a variety of historical contexts, Wrong Turn is a brilliant summation of Gentile’s views of the failures of COIN, as well as a trenchant reevaluation of US operations in Afghanistan. “Gentile is convinced that Obama’s ‘surge’ in Afghanistan can’t work. . . . And, if Afghanistan doesn’t turn around soon, the Democrats . . . who have come to embrace the Petraeus-Nagl view of modern warfare . . . may find themselves wondering whether it’s time to go back to the drawing board.” —The New Republic
Download or read book Ethics and Counterrevolution written by Kermit D. Johnson and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 1997 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an ethical critique of U.S. policy and involvement in counterrevolutionary war. It rejects the thesis that the end of the Cold War means the end of revolution, since revolution is grounded in root causes. The defining characteristics of revolutionary war are outlined based on thought ranging from Mao Tse-tung to modern counterinsurgency theorists to recent U.S. national security directives and military publications. Underlying doctrines for U.S. interventions are traced from the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary to Kennedy's Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the Nixon Doctrine. From previous U.S. war-fighting experience and declaratory policy, an outline of national policy and strategy for counterinsurgency emerges. This policy has been a formula for winning wars, not revolutions. The book advocates the adoption of a modest political Hippocratic oath of 'Do no harm' and argues that civiliization, demilitarization, and the root causes for revolution are necessary for the building of true democracy.
Download or read book When Bad States Win written by Jeffrey Treistman and published by . This book was released on 2022-07-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the belief that democratic institutions and economic growth are effective tools for defeating an insurgency. Jeffrey Treistman reveals that while moderate violence can lead to government overthrow, bad actors that pursue indiscriminate violence and brutal repression can defeat a rebellion. As a result, bad states sometimes win.
Download or read book Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in South Africa written by Daniel L. Douek and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South Africa's transition to democracy took place against a backdrop of shadow war between the apartheid regime's counterinsurgency forces and the African National Congress' armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). This book analyses in unprecedented detail the hidden history of MK's struggle and its contribution to South Africa's liberation, while exposing new dimensions of clandestine apartheid-era violence. Drawing on interviews with former MK guerrillas, Daniel Douek traces the evolution of MK's operations across southern Africa from the 1960s, culminating in the 1990-4 negotiations between the ANC and the white supremacist regime. As political violence escalated, the battle waged in the shadows became nothing less than a struggle to shape South Africa's future. Counterinsurgency forces recruited spies, deployed death squads, engaged in psychological warfare, and targeted ANC leaders, including MK chief Chris Hani. Even once ANC elites had come to power, apartheid counterinsurgency operations continued to undermine South Africa's new democracy by marginalizing MK guerrillas within the 'new' security forces, leaving legacies of violence and instability still felt today.
Download or read book On Internal War written by William E. Odom and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William E. Odom combines expertise in political science and military affairs to challenge both conventional and unconventional wisdom about insurgencies and political development. The author concludes that in all three components of U.S. strategy for counterinsurgency--political, economic, and military--faulty notions of causation inform policy. U.S. advice to embattled governments fails to recognize the inherent clash of development goals; direct fiscal aid hurts more often than it helps recipient governments; and the focus of U.S. military assistance on fighting insurgents plays to their strengths and fails to exploit their weaknesses. On Internal War reviews the contrasting theory and practice in Soviet and American approaches to their competition in the Third World and relates them to indigenous causes of internal wars. Odom also integrates the military dimensions of insurgencies with external influences and internal politics. Drawing on political development theory, he underscores the sources of instability in Third World states that make insurgencies more likely and offers ways to assess the prospects for democracy in specific cases. The centerpiece of the study is a practical application of the author's analysis to three case studies--El Salvador, Guatemala, and the Philippines--and a regional assessment of the Middle East. Odom provides no panaceas but suggests that more promising strategies can be devised.
Download or read book Counterinsurgency Field Manual written by The U.S. Army Marine Corps and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the U.S. military invaded Iraq, it lacked a common understanding of the problems inherent in counterinsurgency campaigns. It had neither studied them, nor developed doctrine and tactics to deal with them. It is fair to say that in 2003, most Army officers knew more about the U.S. Civil War than they did about counterinsurgency. The U.S. Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual was written to fill that void. The result of unprecedented collaboration among top U.S. military experts, scholars, and practitioners in the field, the manual espouses an approach to combat that emphasizes constant adaptation and learning, the importance of decentralized decision-making, the need to understand local politics and customs, and the key role of intelligence in winning the support of the population. The manual also emphasizes the paradoxical and often counterintuitive nature of counterinsurgency operations: sometimes the more you protect your forces, the less secure you are; sometimes the more force you use, the less effective it is; sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction. An new introduction by Sarah Sewall, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, places the manual in critical and historical perspective, explaining the significance and potential impact of this revolutionary challenge to conventional U.S. military doctrine. An attempt by our military to redefine itself in the aftermath of 9/11 and the new world of international terrorism, The U.S. Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual will play a vital role in American military campaigns for years to come. The University of Chicago Press will donate a portion of the proceeds from this book to the Fisher House Foundation, a private-public partnership that supports the families of America’s injured servicemen. To learn more about the Fisher House Foundation, visit www.fisherhouse.org.
Download or read book A Question of Command written by Mark Moyar and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-20 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moyar presents a wide-ranging history of counterinsurgency which draws on the historical record and interviews with hundreds of counterinsurgency veterans. He identifies the ten critical attributes of counterinsurgency leadership and reveals why these attributes have been more prevalent in some organizations than others.
Download or read book The Counterrevolution written by Bernard E. Harcourt and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A distinguished political theorist sounds the alarm about the counterinsurgency strategies used to govern Americans Militarized police officers with tanks and drones. Pervasive government surveillance and profiling. Social media that distract and track us. All of these, contends Bernard E. Harcourt, are facets of a new and radical governing paradigm in the United States--one rooted in the modes of warfare originally developed to suppress anticolonial revolutions and, more recently, to prosecute the war on terror. The Counterrevolution is a penetrating and disturbing account of the rise of counterinsurgency, first as a military strategy but increasingly as a way of ruling ordinary Americans. Harcourt shows how counterinsurgency's principles--bulk intelligence collection, ruthless targeting of minorities, pacifying propaganda--have taken hold domestically despite the absence of any radical uprising. This counterrevolution against phantom enemies, he argues, is the tyranny of our age. Seeing it clearly is the first step to resisting it effectively.
Download or read book Countering Insurgency and Promoting Democracy written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
