Small Wars Journal

The Risks of Military Cutbacks

Sat, 12/03/2011 - 7:37am

The Risks of Military Cutbacks - David Ignatius, Washington Post.

… As COIN has fallen out of fashion, there’s a new bubble of enthusiasm for the counterterrorism tactics used by the special forces in their “night raids” against Taliban targets. But Petraeus, the intellectual architect of modern Army doctrine, has long argued that it is a mistake to juxtapose the “population-centric” and “enemy-centric” approaches as if they were alternative strategies. Instead, according to Petraeus, they are mutually reinforcing parts of a broad counterinsurgency campaign…