-
Policy Forum
The U.S. Military and Counterinsurgency: What We Have Learned in Iraq and Afghanistan
Featuring
Featuring: Jeffrey Record, Professor, Air War College, Author of Beating Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win; Thomas E. Ricks, Senior Pentagon Correspondent, Washington Post, Author of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq: Conrad Crane, Director, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Army War College Lead, author of the Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual; and Christopher Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies, Cato Institute.
America’s conventional military supremacy has failed to deliver decisive results against irregular forces employing unconventional military tactics. The U.S. military learned some useful counterinsurgency lessons in Vietnam but had completely forgotten those lessons by the end of the Cold War. Military leaders and defense experts are attempting to resurrect some of those old ideas, while also developing new approaches to counterinsurgency in the age of transnational terrorism. Are there deeper cultural problems that prevent the U.S. military from waging effective counterinsurgency campaigns? Does the American public have the will to risk American lives on such operations, and is the public prepared to wage limited, indecisive military campaigns for long periods of time? What lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan might be applied to future conflicts?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.