Landing the Big One

Landing the Big One

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Small Wars: Max Boot on the Future Wars of Insurgencies

Foreign Affairs has Max Boot on More Small Wars: Counterinsurgency Is Here to Stay
:
If only a nation as powerful and vulnerable as the United States had the option of defining exactly which types of wars it wages. Reality, alas, seldom cooperates. Over the centuries, U.S. presidents of all political persuasions have found it necessary to send troops to fight adversaries ranging from the Barbary pirates to Filipino insurrectos to Haitian cacos to Vietnamese communists to Somali warlords to Serbian death squads to Taliban guerrillas to al Qaeda terrorists. Unlike traditional armies, these enemies seldom met U.S. forces in the open, which meant that they could not be defeated quickly. To beat such shadowy foes, American troops had to undertake the time-intensive, difficult work of what’s now known as counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and nation building.

Video discussion:



We did touch on this during our discussion with John Nagl on Midrats:


Check Out Military Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Midrats on BlogTalkRadio

Or download the show from iTunes. It's all free. Except for that value of time thing.

UPDATE: No spell check for post headlines or why do I catch them only after the post is up?

No comments:

Post a Comment