Home, Above Feeds, Annoucement

This article explores the sources of urban insecurity and violence in Karachi, Pakistan since the 1990s. Based on fieldwork, the article also examines and assesses the effects and effectiveness of a wide-range of anti-crime measures, including the deployments of national military and paramilitary forces, the role of national and local police forces as well as of politicians, the business community, and civil society in responding to violent crime and a broad set of local illicit economies. As Pakistan’s key transportation and manufacturing hub and economic engine, Karachi is also deeply intermeshed in global smuggling networks. Moreover, in Karachi, crime and violence, including, but beyond terrorism, are also deeply intertwined with ethnic politics.

Book Review of David C. Rapoport's "Waves of Global Terrorism" by SWJ−El Centro Intern Keaton O.K. Bunker.

In August of 2021, coalition forces - centered on a persistent NATO task force - orchestrated a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Before the international community could clear the last of their troops, administrators, and aid workers, the Taliban reclaimed de facto control of Afghanistan, signaling the unequivocal failure of a twenty-year-long engagement. The coalition's intervention began as a near-flawless unconventional warfare (UW) campaign, and escalated into a conventional campaign before devolving into a disunited mixture of nation-building and counterinsurgency. As NATO divided Afghanistan into a series of fiefdoms overseen by individual member countries, the Taliban re-organized and re-infiltrated. By exploiting continuous missteps by the coalition, international community, and Afghan government, the Taliban managed to turn the coalition's scheduled evacuation into a rout. This largely mirrored other recent campaigns in Iraq, and later Syria and Libya. This mixture of partial and outright failures contributes to a series of inevitable conclusions.

          Since early June the Ukrainian’s summer offensive has enmeshed itself in the Russian’s defensive belts and has made little headway.  Observing the scene from afar, if I had to guess as to whether the Ukrainians will (a) be able to break through all the Russians defensive belts and conduct grand sweeping maneuver warfare that will reach Melitipol and eventually liberate Crimea. Or (b) they will continue to be stymied like General Model’s forces were in their attack on the Russian defensive belts in the northern part of the Kursk salient eighty years ago, my money would be on the latter, with the Russians being able to contain the Ukrainian’s offensive. The issue is that while the Russians may be able to hold off the Ukrainians, that’s not the same thing as defeating them.  The Russian army has been savaged in the Ukraine with much of its offensive capability wasted in badly conceived and executed operations during the first few months of the war.  So don’t look for any far-ranging Operational Maneuver Groups of Red Army lore from them either.  Instead, what we find is a high-tech version of the Western front in the first world war.  An eastern European Passchendaele – with drones.

Following an aborted Thanksgiving 2021 attempt that mostly involved me falling asleep, I recently made a concerted effort to plough through David Albright and Andrea Stricker's 2018 volume, Taiwan's Former Nuclear Weapons Program: Nuclear Weapons On-Demand. While Albright and Stricker's volume adds to the corpus of cold war case studies, its contents leave a great deal to be desired, and arguably neglect many of the most important questions raised by their subject matter.

Note: The first Demining conference by the American University in Kyiv was held in May with some 500 participants from all sectors Ukraine society as well as the international community.  There 8 expert panel members , 4 from Ukraine, and 4 international experts. The American University Kyiv is powered by Arizona State University and is the 1st American style university in Ukraine with the mission to transform advanced education in Ukraine.   The American University in Kyiv plans to have a second conference at West Point to bring the key decision makers from Ukraine, who need resources, to the United States, to be introduced to those who have the resources, from various US military units as well as US government agencies.   

Policy, in its relation to traditional warfare, is arguably most influential at the beginning of and near the end of the conflict, but what about an Irregular War (IW) that is protracted? Policy and its relationship to IW, sometimes called Political Warfare, blurs the lines, both in its relationship to strategy and its weight during campaign execution. Options for Irregular Warfare policy present challenges as well as opportunities, and framing the problem properly is vital. Military planners are successful when they can match means to objective, and end states are clearly defined. In this current peer conflict, the policy of containment will not be sufficient, and that is why a policy of flexible “constrainment” is needed.

It has been a trend in Latin America to see how terrorist groups have evolved into criminal groups involved in the cocaine trade. Revolutionary and leftist organizations have generated revenue from the cocaine trade when they have pursued ideological goals. Moreover, they ended up in the cocaine trade when they were defeated by the military or negotiated with the local governments. The groups in Colombia have followed suit. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or FARC) were involved in the cocaine trade long years and became one of the biggest suppliers of cocaine in the region. After the FARC ended due to negotiations, the group has created dissident groups that has followed the FARC’s ideology or become involved in the cocaine trade. This article analyzes revolutionary and paramilitary groups and how they evolve into cocaine groups. After examining the FARC’s negotiations with the government, it concentrates on the FARC dissident groups and discusses the likely results of successful talks with the ELN.

In the face of mounting global challenges, Congress stands at a crossroads with the M26 HIMARS Cluster Rockets. The question is simple: Why destroy these potent weapons when they can be transferred to Ukraine at no cost to the American taxpayer?

Las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or FARC have their origin in a period of continuous and widespread political, social, and economic unrest that is commonly known as “La Violencia” in contemporary Colombian History. Identifying the underlying causes behind this important historical period is crucial to our understanding of the motivation behind the rise of the longest-lived insurgency in the western hemisphere.