New Issue of COIN Center Colloquium Released
The new issue of the US Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center Colloquium has been released and can be found at the COIN Center Blog.
From the COIN Center – two articles of potential interest to academicians, policy makers, and practitioners alike:
In From Lebanon to Gaza: A New Kind of War, Ariel Siegelman draws on first-hand experience in Lebanon and Gaza to describe a new kind of war, in which “the enemy cannot hope to match Western technology, so he operates in a way to make the technology relatively meaningless.” Siegelman, who served in the Israel Defense Force (IDF), Special Forces, as a counter terror operative, counter terror sniper and counter terror instructor, argues that the 2006 Lebanon War exemplifies “the wrong way to confront… this new kind of war,” but that the recent IDF operations in Gaza demonstrate that Western militaries can appropriately prosecute such conflicts. This new kind of war, however, requires Western militaries to define success in a new way, one that recognizes that violence may ebb and flow, but that the conflict is never truly over.
In The Business of War: How Criminal Organizations Perpetuate Conflict and What To Do about It, Brock Dahl argues that “attacking criminal organizations is an essential element of the COIN fight.” Without confronting organized criminal organizations, it is much more difficult to stabilize transitional societies. Mr. Dahl, who served for the US Department of the Treasury in Baghdad and on the Afghanistan Interagency Operations Group from 2006 to 2008, and who is now studying law at The George Washington University, investigates the legal and policy considerations of US military forces supporting law enforcement activities overseas.
