Small Wars Journal

Blog Posts

SWJ Blog is a multi-author blog publishing news and commentary on the various goings on across the broad community of practice.  We gladly accept guest posts from serious voices in the community.

by Associated Press | Sat, 03/30/2019 - 1:08am | 0 comments
"Philippine communist guerrillas marked the 50th anniversary of their rural rebellion on Friday with threats of more attacks, possibly in cities, as a negotiated settlement remains elusive and peace talks have repeatedly stalled."
by Association of the United States Army | Fri, 03/29/2019 - 6:29pm | 0 comments
"For more than a decade, America’s “secret war” in Laos involved U.S. Army special operations forces, false IDs and cover stories—and the secrecy surrounding it has remained relatively intact until now."
by InSight Crime | Fri, 03/29/2019 - 4:50pm | 0 comments
"The ELN, Colombia’s last rebel army, has engaged in exponential growth over the last four years, both in Colombia and within Venezuela, and may now be described as a Colombo-Venezuelan force, with enormous implications for both countries."
by The Washington Post | Fri, 03/29/2019 - 4:25am | 0 comments
"Thousands of miles away from the Islamic State’s stronghold in Syria and Iraq, a lesser-known epidemic of insurgency has upended the lives of millions of people."
by The Washington Post | Fri, 03/29/2019 - 3:58am | 0 comments
"Days after President Trump declared the Islamic State’s caliphate had been eliminated in Syria, the prime minister of one of West Africa’s most turbulent nations urged the United States to shift attention to a rising extremist threat in the Sahel."
by The Wall Street Journal | Fri, 03/29/2019 - 3:49am | 0 comments
"The U.N. Security Council unanimously approved a resolution Thursday naming terrorist financing a serious crime and demanding that all countries set up a domestic legal framework to counter the practice."
by Military Times | Fri, 03/29/2019 - 12:47am | 0 comments
"Afghanistan remains dependent on the U.S.-led coalition to combat insurgencies, pay Afghan troops, maintain oversight of corruption and generally just prevent the country from devolving into chaos. That doesn’t bode well for the peace negotiations currently underway between U.S. and Taliban diplomatic teams."
by The Wall Street Journal | Thu, 03/28/2019 - 6:34pm | 0 comments
"Russia hit back against U.S. warnings over its support for Venezuela’s government, defending its arms trade with the Latin American country and promising to keep its military advisers there as long as President Nicolás Maduro deemed necessary."
by CNN News | Thu, 03/28/2019 - 5:49pm | 0 comments
"The Defense Department is scouting sites along the US-Mexico border to erect new physical barriers, according to two department officials."
by Defense One | Thu, 03/28/2019 - 4:47pm | 0 comments
"The dramatic increase in U.S. airstrikes that began last year has brought the country no closer to peace. In fact, Afghan soldiers, police, and civilians are dying at record rates."
by National Review | Thu, 03/28/2019 - 3:07pm | 0 comments
"When will America’s leaders tell the truth about our role in the conflict?"
by The Wall Street Journal | Thu, 03/28/2019 - 8:01am | 0 comments
"Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has pinned his survival on shunning computers and mobile phones in favor of human messengers."
by Military Times | Thu, 03/28/2019 - 7:21am | 0 comments
"The U.S. mission in Somalia has garnered attention as airstrikes in the country ramped up over the past few years, but it is a band of specialized local infantry being trained by American contractors and U.S. troops that Africa Command says is the primary security effort there.vSomalia’s Danab Advanced Infantry Brigade, or lightning force, is a growth point that AFRICOM is eagerly cultivating."
by The Modern War Institute | Thu, 03/28/2019 - 6:50am | 0 comments
"Why is it important to even ask the question, though, of whether a city can be killed? It is important for many reasons. When we try to answer the question, it makes clear the lack of a uniform and widely accepted definition of cities, and a generally poor understanding of them. They are not, as the US military tends to view them, just major combinations of manmade physical terrain, a population, and a supporting infrastructure. Most importantly, asking the question exposes the lack of a widely used and real-time framework and set of analytical tools for understanding how cities survive, adapt, and flourish."
by The Washington Post | Thu, 03/28/2019 - 4:38am | 0 comments
"Four years, nine months, billions of dollars and tens of thousands of allied fighters’ lives. As the U.S.-backed Syrian forces declared a triumphant end last weekend to the battle against the Islamic State, Gen. Joseph Votel, the head of U.S. Central Command, took a mental inventory."
by Military Times | Thu, 03/28/2019 - 3:52am | 0 comments
"It has been difficult to find a credible number for the Islamic State group’s total troop strength ever since it emerged, and speculation has ranged widely."
by SWJ Editors | Wed, 03/27/2019 - 4:01pm | 0 comments
Saad Masood - 'Daily Times' (Pakistan) - "This policy of reconciliation is tasked with curbing the insurgent tendency that aims to usurp power away from the government. Terrorism is one of the main strategies that executes this insurgent policy. Therefore, it stands to reason that – after deliberating the counter insurgency policy – a counter terrorism policy is also envisaged and adopted. That is also because, in the sequence of events, generally insurgency will come first and lead to terrorism, which comes second. That is why, even in the order of responses, nominally counter insurgency comes first and counter terrorism second."
by The Wall Street Journal | Wed, 03/27/2019 - 3:37pm | 0 comments
"U.S. officials walked out of a meeting here that was attended by the top defense aide of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, in the latest sign of fraying ties between Washington and Kabul over negotiations with the Taliban to end the 18-year Afghan war."
by Associated Press | Wed, 03/27/2019 - 2:15pm | 0 comments
"Top lawmakers are blasting the Trump administration's proposal to slash funding for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development."
by The Washington Post | Wed, 03/27/2019 - 6:39am | 0 comments
"Kashmir could be 'hurtling towards a heightened phase of terrorism,' according to an assessment recently published by the South Asia Terrorism Portal, a Delhi-based website that tracks militant groups in the region. Even as the Indian government has clamored for action against Pakistan, 'what is being completely overlooked are strategies to restore internal stability and sober governance' to Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state."
by The British Broadcasting Corporation | Wed, 03/27/2019 - 6:33am | 0 comments
"After months of fighting, the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) has finally lost Baghuz, a village in eastern Syria that came to represent the final chapter in its self-styled caliphate."
by The Wall Street Journal | Wed, 03/27/2019 - 3:50am | 0 comments
"In Islamic State’s former eastern Syrian stronghold, the Islamic Republic of Iran is parlaying its military and economic might into a lasting foothold."
by Stars & Stripes | Wed, 03/27/2019 - 2:20am | 0 comments
"Acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan told House lawmakers Tuesday that a new review into the deadly October 2017 ambush in Niger that left four American soldiers dead is underway."
by The National Interest | Tue, 03/26/2019 - 3:30pm | 0 comments
"Many of the extremist group's fighters will now become insurgents but that is not something America can solve."
by The Wall Street Journal | Tue, 03/26/2019 - 2:01pm | 0 comments
"Focus will change from years of armed conflict to confrontation with dispersed, furtive insurgency."