Way Of War Research Articles

American Ways of War since 1945

This essay considers the literature about an American way of war. It pays particular attention to the U.S. in the world since 1945, but also situates contemporary American warfare in its longer historical trajectory. It addresses the early Cold War era, the Vietnam War era, and the post-Cold War era as distinct periods in which different threats, or threat perceptions, shaped American strategy; yet it also shows underlying continuities in the national security ideology, heavy emphasis on technological solutions, and the search for proper operational approaches and doctrine.

Clausewitz: The Debate Continues

Stephen L. Melton. The Clausewitz Delusion: How the American Army Screwed Up the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (A Way Forward). Minneapolis: Zenith Press, 2009. 309 pp. $30.00. ISBN: 978-0-7603- 371...

From Cultural Contact to Conquest: Rome and the Creation of a Tribal Zone in the North-Western Iberian Peninsula

In recent decades, archaeological and historical research on the Iron Age in the north-western Iberian Peninsula, as in many other areas and archaeological contexts, has developed a ‘pacifist’ interpretation. This is based, among other aspects, upon the rejection of the functional nature of the weapons documented in the archaeological record and on the development of a hypothesis on the non-defensive nature of walls, interpreting these structures as a symbol of the community or as an indication of the cohesion of the group living in the settlement. Such an interpretation can be integrated with the idea of a pre- and proto-historic ‘pacified past’ developed after the Second World War, which considered that ‘before civilization, war was rare, ritualised, abnormal and foreign to human psychology’ and with the belief that there has been a evolutionary progression from a primitive to a civilized way of war.

Drone Warfare: Blowback from the New American Way of War

Drone Warfare: Blowback from the New American Way of War

IRAQ 2003 (PART 3)1: THE ROAD TO … NOWHERE?

A new type of war?When he addressed the US Navy League’s Sea Air Space Exposition in Washington DC just a few days after the fall of Baghdad, and again when he gave the 25th annual Ira C. Eaker Distinguished Lecture on May 1st, General Richard B. Myers, America’s highest-ranking officer, chose a very interesting title for both his speeches: “The New American Way of War.”

The U.S. Armed Forces' View of War

© 2011 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences BRIAN MCALLISTER LINN is Professor of History and Ralph R. Thomas Professor in Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. His publications include Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Paci1⁄2c, 1902–1940 (1997) and The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (2000), both of which received the Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award, and The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War (2007). His current project is Elvis’s Army: Transformation and the Atomic-Era Soldier, 1946–1965. Despite the continual issuance of buzzwords emphasizing service unity and harmony–such as “jointness,” “An Army of One,” or “The Few, the Proud”–the armed forces’ internal divisions have been vividly displayed during the last decade. A number of important books detail the disagreements between civilian and military leaders and the long struggle to implement the “surge” and the counterinsurgency (coin) strategy.1 The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have generated a radical transformation in military thought: that is, a paradigm shift from idealized, techno-centric, scienti1⁄2c formulas–such as “network-centric warfare” (ncw) or “effects-based operations” (ebo)–to more complex, ambiguous, and human-centered visions of war, which were encapsulated in 2007 by The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.2 This intellectual renaissance has led, according to some, to military victory in Iraq and a path to eventual success in Afghanistan. This interpretation is attractive because it implies that the U.S. armed forces are adaptive, learning organizations that will develop new concepts to replace failed ones. But it begs a number of central ques-

How we fight: crusades, quagmires, and the American way of war

How we fight: crusades, quagmires, and the American way of war

Military Contractors & the American Way of War

Contractors are deeply intertwined with the American military and U.S. foreign policy. Over half of the personnel the United States has deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003 have been con- tractors. Their relationship with the U.S. government, the public, and domestic and international law differs from that of military personnel, and these differences pose both bene½ts and risks. America's use of private military and security companies (PMSCs) can provide or enhance forces for global gover- nance. Yet PMSCs can also be used to pursue agendas that do not have the support of American, inter- national, or local publics. Thus far, the use of PMSCs has proved a mixed bag in terms of effectiveness, accountability, and American values. Moving forward in a way that maximizes the bene½ts of contrac- tors and minimizes their risks will require careful management of the uncomfortable trade-offs these forces present.

Civilianising warfare: ways of war and peace in modern counterinsurgency

This article examines the emergence of counterinsurgency doctrine in Coalition interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. While counterinsurgency is complimentary to the tenets forwarded by its classical military predecessors in several respects, the article shows that it is also more than a refashioning of conventional military practice. Counterinsurgency is intimately tied to institutional practices that shape global liberal governance. It can be traced to dominant trends in international humanitarian, development and peace interventionism since the end of the Cold War and it deepens the links between the social development of war-affected populations and the politics of international security. Rather than simply a shift in military practice, counterinsurgency is distinguished by its investment in civilian modes of warfare. Counterinsurgency retells the narrative of intervention as part of the evolution of political and economic liberalisation, marking a passage from interventionary force to post-interventionary governance. Modern counterinsurgency, it is concluded, exposes the widening indistinction between contemporary modes of peace and those of war in international relations.

The everywhere war

Much of the discussion of 9/11 has debated its historical significance, but it is equally important to explore the geographical dimensions of the wars that have been conducted in its shadows. Subsequent transformations in the American way of war have played a major role in the increased militarisation of the planet. Most attention has been focused on Afghanistan and Iraq as the principal theatres of the ‘war on terror’, but one of the characteristics of late modern war is the emergent, ‘event-ful’ quality of military, paramilitary and terrorist violence that can, in principle, occur anywhere. Vulnerabilities are differentially distributed but widely dispersed, and in consequence late modern war is being changed by the slippery spaces through which it is conducted. This paper explores three global borderlands to bring those changes into focus: Afghanistan–Pakistan (particularly the deployment of CIA-controlled drones in Pakistan), US–Mexico (particularly the expansion of Mexico's ‘drug war’ and the US militarisation of the border), and cyberspace (particularly the role of stealth attacks on critical infrastructure and the formation of US Cyber Command).

Military History at the Operational Level: An Interview with Robert M. Citino

Military History at the Operational Level: An Interview with Robert M. Citino Donald A. Yerxa ROBERT CITINO, WHOSE ESSAY ON THE GERMAN WAY OF war appeared in the November 2010 issue of Historically Speaking, is one of the most perceptive military historians writing today. In the last decade he has a written a number of important books on modern military history, particularly the German military experience. These include: Quest for Decisive Victory: From Stalemate to Blitzkrieg in Europe, 1899–1940 (University Press of Kansas, 2002); Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare (University Press of Kansas, 2004), winner of both the American Historical Association’s Paul Birdsall Prize in European Military and Strategic History and the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award; The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich (University Press of Kansas, 2005); and Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 (University Press of Kansas, 2007). In 2007 Citino was named the best university teacher in the U.S. in a RateMyProfessors.com poll. After reading all the books listed above, senior editor Donald Yerxa interviewed Citino in March 2011. Donald A. Yerxa : What prompted you to become a military historian? Robert M. Citino : I always like to answer this question by saying that my father fought in World War II. Of course, that’s no answer at all, because in the time and place I grew up (born on the West Side of Cleveland in 1958), everybody’s father had fought in World War II. When we played in the neighborhood, we played “army,” and the war we fought out was World War II. I guess I just took it a little farther than most of my friends—and for that I blame my parents, who gave all of their children a love of reading. I started reading books on World War II as a child and I have never stopped. So parents, if your child is reading too much, beware! Yerxa : Why did you focus on German military history? Citino : I didn’t go to college to be a military historian. I wanted to be a historian of the Weimar Republic, and was especially enthralled by its culture—Brecht and Zuckmayer and the great filmmakers and musicians. That’s why I decided to learn German. As my scholarly interest in military questions grew, I found myself turning more and more toward German military history, and realized that there was a vast literature auf deutsch that most military historians were not using at all. It seemed like a natural fit. Yerxa : Would it be fair to say that the single most important theme common to all your recent books is the value of appreciating military history at the operational level? And if so, how is operational military history distinguished from other genres of analysis? Citino : Yes, that’s a fair statement. The middle ground between low-level tactics and high-level strategy, what we call the operational level of war, is what my books emphasize. If “tactics” discusses battles, and “strategy” analyzes the war, “operations” refers to the campaign, a series of maneuvers and battles involving big units: divisions, corps, and armies. Click for larger view View full resolution From Friedrich August Dressler, Moltke in his Home (John Murray, 1907). Yerxa : What insights emerge when you look at military history at the operational level? Citino : I don’t make any special claim for operational-level analysis. It isn’t a magic key to understanding warfare, but it has traditionally been underserved in the literature, especially the English-language literature. The Wehrmacht’s signal victory in France in 1940, Case Yellow, for example, is pretty hard to understand if you just look at tactics. French tanks and British aircraft were for the most part superior to the German machines they were facing. Strategically, Germany was in a nearly hopeless situation; without a fleet, Germany had embarked on a long war against the world’s great naval powers. In that middle “operational” ground, however, the Germans came up with a daring campaign plan (sending their panzers though the Ardennes forest) that completely flustered their enemies, a victory...

China's Anti-Access Strategy in Historical and Theoretical Perspective

This article views China's development of anti-access capabilities against the backdrop of the theory and history of military innovation. It begins with a discussion of the process of military innovation, as well as the indicators that may appear at different stages of that process. It then discusses the barriers to recognizing new ways of war and applies that framework to China's development of advanced ballistic missiles, to include precision-guided conventional ballistic missiles and anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBMs). It concludes with several suggestions for how to improve the ability to recognize and understand foreign military innovation.

The German Way of War Revisited

The German Way of War Revisited Robert M. Citino (bio) MILITARY HISTORIANS MAY NOT HAVE ALL TAKEN THE cultural turn, but cultural dynamics are certainly prominent in recent military historiography. One of the most important of these is the notion that there are distinctive "ways of war" that reflect various cultural traits in nations and their militaries. According to Lawrence Sondhaus, this line of thinking can be traced to the influential interwar military thinker Basil H. Liddell Hart, who argued that the traditional British way of warfare was characterized by an "indirect approach." Ways-of-war thinking has evolved in several intellectual directions to become a major theme of military historical reflection and analysis. In June 2010 a group of distinguished military historians ran a lively session on comparative ways of war (German, American, and Chinese) at the Historical Society's conference held at George Washington University. In the following roundtable we publish revised versions of their conference papers. In the last decade there has been a general agreement among scholars that understanding "culture" is one of military history's most important tasks, and that one way of doing that is to posit the existence of separate national "ways of war"—military cultures that are said to determine how individual nations and their armed institutions fight. Today we can see scholars following at least three separate paths forward. One is to analyze "institutional military culture"—the manner in which a given military establishment sees itself, its calling, and its history, and especially how it does so during peacetime. This path is best represented in Brian Linn's work, especially Echo of Battle. A second might be termed "battlefield culture," focusing specifically on warfighting and attempting to note repetitive patterns that cross conflicts and cross time periods. My own German Way of War is an example, dealing as it does with Prussian and German wars from the time of the Great Elector in the 1650s to World War II. Finally, some historians have sought to survey the much broader field of "national culture," the matrix out of which military institutions spring. Here we might consider the book by Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction, written at about the same time as German Way of War, which looks at very different sources but reaches conclusions that are in many ways similar. Now, we have to admit that these three paths are different. And yet, while they differ in approach, they do share a commonality of outlook. In all these cases, "culture" or "way of war" serves as the water in which the human actors swim, filled with unstated assumptions and default settings of which they may be only dimly aware; it is the envelope of possibilities and expectations in which they live; it is "the box," and "thinking outside of it" is not as easy as it sounds. Click for larger view View full resolution Before the Battle of Jena, 1806. From Poultney Bigelow, "The German Struggle of Liberty," Harper's New Monthly (July 1895). I sometimes feel guilty for starting this whole thing. Russell Weigley, of course, wrote American Way of War a long time ago. It was a seminal work, and while it started a vigorous debate, we can't really say that it started a historiographical school. More recently, in 2001, Richard W. Harrison wrote The Russian Way of War: Operational Art, 1904-1940. It, too, is a work of high scholarly tone and importance, but as the subtitle indicates, it actually deals with doctrinal reform in the Russo-Soviet army during a relatively brief period of time. German Way of War appeared in 2005, and to my mind was something new: an attempt—successful or not—to puzzle out long-term characteristics of the Prusso-German military tradition, to look at those commanders and armies while on campaign, and to see if, for all the time and energy armies expend on military reforms in peacetime, they still tend to fight all their wars more or less the same way every time out. The book stimulated both strong agreement and strong disagreement and continues to do so, but it also benefited from timing: the renewed debate over American warmaking generated by...

Wending Through the Way of War

Wending Through the Way of War James Jay Carafano (bio) For starters, we ought to be speaking of "ways of wars." There is an underlying premise to this viewpoint for military history. How both state and non-state actors fight reflects their national character. Combatants enter conflict with assumptions, perceptions, and preferences that shape the way they intend to engage in warfare. These are shaped before the battle. They are unique to the competitor. They change over time. The three papers here argue for the utility of thinking about "ways of wars," though they all find problems with past efforts at mastering this approach. To me, weighing the good and the bad suggests at least three principles for applying the ways of wars perspective to the study of conflict. A first principle of war ways should be: think big and broadly. As Rob Citino points out, it would be too much to speak of the study of the ways of wars as a historiographical school. That said, what often purports to serve as the guiding idea for determining how militaries wage warfare looks mostly at doctrine and tradition. The more I study military history the more I have come to believe that that perspective is far too narrow. Click for larger view View full resolution From Berthold Laufer, Chinese Clay Figures: Prolegomena on the History of Defensive Armor, Part 1 (Field Museum of Natural History, 1914). The dynamic relationships between the civilian and military spheres of society can dramatically affect ways of going to war. This is not to suggest that New Military History is a good idea. In fact, I think that approach has turned into a historian's dead end. In 1991 Peter Paret heralded its arrival. "The New Military History," he wrote, "stands for an effort to integrate the study of military institutions and their actions more closely with other kinds of history." He saw it as a potent weapon that military historians could use to "fight the indifference or hostility of their colleagues on the one hand, and against the narrowness of much of military history on the other."1 Unfortunately, rather than enriching our understanding of warfare by studying issues of gender, culture, and social structures, it has for the most part done anything but. University departments continue to push military studies to the margin. Meanwhile, New Military History cranks out monographs that only tangentially inform our understanding of the conduct of warfare. New Military History's first cousin is national identity theory, which claims that cultural traits influence how nations act.2 Political scientists mimicked historians with their promises. The results, however, have generally been similar, with studies that tell us more about the authors' cultural assumptions and political and social axes to grind than how and why enemies confront one another. My favorite example is Natalie Bormann's National Missile Defense and the Politics of U.S. Identity: A Poststructural Critique (Manchester University Press, 2008). She starts out assuming that the desire for missile defenses is irrational. She dismisses all the feasibility and cost issues in two pages, citing only the opinions of outspoken missile defense critics. She then spends one hundred plus pages "creating" a national identity that explains why Americans would try doing something so stupid as to protect themselves from nuclear attack. If the study of ways of wars is going to better it will have to integrate the study of military operations [End Page 25] and activities with the wider world—not push them to the sidelines. This story can only be told by bringing together disparate brands of history that hardly ever get mentioned in the same breath: military history, the story of battle, blood, and bugles; the history of science and technology; and social, economic, business, cultural, and intellectual history, the exploration of how changes in beliefs and relationships among individuals and communities shape the way humans respond to the world around them. A second principle could be: don't think deterministically. No right thinking person would axiomatically assume that an economic historian would be the best person to give advice on a good 401K or predict the next move in the Dow Jones. Yet many, including...

The war for Korea, 1950-1951: they came from the north

for 1950-1951: They Came from the North by Allan R. Millett Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2010 644 pages $45.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] To military historian and one-time US Marine officer Allan R. Millett, the Korean not so much the forgotten war the neglected He opens by chastising his fellow historians for their Eurocentric studies of the Cold War, noting that one devoted eight pages to the Korean War, another a page and a half, and a third skipped over the Korean conflict from 1948 to 1953. Millett, to the contrary, asserts that strategic thinkers and serving officers could learn much from the Korean that applicable today. author, a professor at the University of New Orleans, asserts: I propose that the Korean an example of the one great lesson of twentieth-century warfare: that no conflict should be categorized simply an interstate war or civil war or even a limited insurgency. While such definitions may advance statistical analysis, they are not much help for field diplomats and soldiers. He adds: Understanding the Korean will provide even more relevant examples of a war that embodies almost every aspect of contemporary Particularly pertinent: The Korean conflict remains a major window on the Chinese way of war. most appropriate way to view it, Millett writes, would be as a Maoist people's war, the global socialist template for wars of national liberation and postcolonial succession. Phase One began in 1945 with the end of World II and the division of in which the Soviets took the Japanese surrender north of the 38th parallel and put Kim II Sung in power while the US took the surrender in the south--and then went home. Phase Two started in 1948 when North sent a column of 1,800 partisans into the south to take advantage of a rebellion there. But South Miller asserts, won the unknown war before the forgotten war. That brought on the North Korean invasion of June 1950, which had the backing of Joseph Stalin in Moscow and Mao Zedong in Beijing. Millett labels that Phase Three of the conflict in but contends that Stalin and Mao guessed wrong on the North Korean army's ability to conquer South which led to the intervention of the Chinese People's Volunteer Force (CPVF) in November of 1950. That, Millett says, is the subject of this book, the second in a trilogy on the Korean conflict. author, whose writing a model of clarity, doesn't say it outright but he might well have renamed the Korean the Sino-American War. Note the book's title, The for Korea, not the War in Korea or The between the Koreans. Both the South Korean and North Korean armies turned in spotty performances, to the dismay of their respective American and Chinese allies, leaving the brunt of the battle to the two foreign armies. Mao's motive, having come to power in Beijing just a year before, was to drive the United States off the Asian mainland. …

A Corrective for Cultural Studies: Beyond the Militarization Thesis to the New Military Intelligence

This paper theorizes a new military intelligence and offers a modest corrective to the orthodoxy of the militarization thesis prevalent in cultural studies and the critical human sciences. The biopolitical orientation of population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare in Afghanistan reveals the multidirectional travel of rationalities and forms of coherence between modern liberal ways of rule and Western-bloc expeditionary ways of war. Through the work of Michel Foucault, and drawing on Michael Dillon and Julian Reid’s analysis of the biopoliticization of war (2008), COIN is interrogated as a continuation of biopolitics by other means. Conceptualizing a continuum of “fast” and “slow” military violence to produce islands of security and stability, COIN generates a mix of persuasive material forces that, while not kinetic or combat-oriented, are internal to the battlespace of military warfighting. The aim of this theoretical intervention is to trouble our understanding of military violence and power. Rather than subscribe unconditionally to the idea of a domineering military contaminating domestic civilian environments, the paper establishes a different trajectory: perhaps there is always-already a spirit of counterinsurgency internal to the art of biopolitical governmentality, which in turn conjugates contemporary military ways of war.

Critical Theory and Contemporary World Politics

The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live. By Michael Dillon, Julian Reid. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009. 208 pp., $41.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-415-95300-9). Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds. By Anna M. Agathangelou, L.H.M. Ling. New York: Routledge, 2009. 208 pp., $35.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-415-77280-8). Critical Practices in International Theory: Selected Essays. By James Der Derian. New York: Routledge, 2008. 316 pp., $44.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-415-77241-9). Critical theoretic work has long occupied a curious place in the short disciplinary history of international relations (IR). On the one hand, its proponents have complained—by and large with a very reasonable degree of justification—about its marginalization, underlined not least by the all too often crude, ill-informed, and rather placated dismissals by the mainstream. On the other hand, however, much of the range of critical theoretic conceptual, methodological and analytical inventories has quite profoundly shaped the disciplinary conversation. The recent entrenchment of constructivism—pace its heterogeneity—as a central disciplinary research framework is, viewed in this context, in the broadest sense an indication of just how sustained a challenge “reflectivism” turned out to be for the main contenders in what has sometimes been called the inter-paradigm debate. To some extent, this perhaps unexpected efficacy can be understood better, when the formative moves of constructivism's arrival are taken into account. Critical theoretic scholarship, then, performed the prominent function of keeping IR as a disciplinary conversation in touch with philosophical, theoretical, and methodological debates in cogent disciplines. This function has, in fact, been frequently acknowledged, not least by proponents of the “normalization” of IR as a distinct and epistemically autonomous realm of social scientific concern. Hand in hand with such meanwhile commonplace acknowledgements of critical theories’ formative contributions go, however, the equally commonplace, almost mantric incantations regarding their short-comings. Setting aside more ill-tempered tropes (such as the oft invoked avowed charges of obscurantism, obsequiousness, or faddish theoreticism), such admonishments by and large converge around the notion that critical theorists fail to deliver when it comes to substantive contributions to knowledge about international, or world politics. Irrespective of which particular ideals of social scientific propriety are embraced by those asking critical IR scholars for “the beef,” there is little doubt on their part that the …

The Ashgate research companion to modern warfare

Contents: Introduction, George Kassimeris and John Buckley Part I Strategy and Conduct of War: The Western way of war, Jeremy Black Strategic thought: the relevance of Clausewitz, Antulio J. Echevarria II Development of modern counterinsurgency theory and doctrine, James S. Corum Air power: the quest to remove battle from war, Joel Hayward Sea power, Andrew Lambert Land warfare: attrition and manoeuvre, John Buckley. Part II Aspects of Modern War: After the RMA: contemporary intelligence, power and war, John Ferris Cyberwar, Myriam Dunn Cavelty 20th century military spending patterns, Jari Eloranta The politics of the contemporary trade in major conventional weapons, Mark Pythian Turning war into business: private security companies and commercial opportunism, Chris Kinsey Women in the armed forces of Western democracies, Helena Carreiras Women and World War II, Lucy Noakes. Part III Morality and Law: Ethics and the enduring relevance of just war theory in the 21st century, David Whetham Lying down with dogs: the inadequacy of Machiavellianism as a basis for US foreign policy, Thomas M. Kane Civilization and savagery, Brett Bowden International law: military force and armed conflict, Christopher P.M. Waters and James A. Green Humanitarian intervention: genocide, crimes against humanity and the use of force, Steven Haines 'Forgetful warriors': neglected lessons on leadership from Plato's Republic, George R. Lucas. Part IV Perceptions and Representations of Warfare: Land of ghosts? Memories of war in the Balkans, Patrick Finney Cinema and the Cold War: an international perspective, Tony Shaw Music as an inspiration for combat among American soldiers in Iraq, Jonathan Pieslak Media war and media management, Stephen Badsey From psychological warfare to information operations and back again, Philip M. Taylor Small wars and telecommunication, Thomas Rid Index.

Foucault’s Legacy: Security, War and Violence in the 21st Century

Anticipating the strategic confluence between liberal ways of war and liberal ways of development, the ideas of Michel Foucault have increasingly resonated in the field of security studies. Foregrounding in particular the biopolitical imperative at the heart of liberal governance, critical attention has been given to the manner in which life itself becomes the principle referent object for security practices. In mapping out these key debates, this article will nuance our understanding of Foucault’s relevance by explaining: how liberal security governance today operates within a globally inclusive imaginary to the defection of all meaningful Newtonian distinctions; how liberal biopolitics displaces the bare life of the sovereign encounter with the bare activity of species survival; how principally tasking security practitioners with sorting and adjudicating between different forms of species life reveals a distinct biopolitical aporia, in the sense that making life live demands the elimination of that which poses an internal cultural threat to its will to rule; how the rationalization of violence through doing what is necessary out of species necessity implies that humanity’s most purposeful expression appears through the battles that are waged upon life, for life, on a planetary scale; how the liberal encounter has created conditions akin to a global state of civil war that offers a marked conceptual departure from traditional sovereign paradigms; and why the onto-theological dimensions that give moral sanction to liberal biopolitical rule now demand the most serious critical attention.

Counterinsurgency's Impossible Trilemma

Ever since the conventional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan turned into irregular conflicts, both students of war and practitioners have furiously debated counterinsurgency's logic, goals, and chances...