Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare

Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare – Book Review by Robert Kaplan, Wall Street Journal.

Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare

Edited by Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian

(Osprey, 304 pages, $27.95)

… Western military men hate abstractions and worship the concrete. Indeed, the dream of powerful, industrial-age militaries — as epitomized by the U.S. Army — is to fight on a circumscribed battlefield empty of civilians, to close with the enemy, and then kill it through a rapid maneuver of tanks, infantry and artillery. The trouble is that the enemy doesn’t always oblige. And when it doesn’t, industrial-age militaries like America’s, rather than quickly adjust tactics, tend to go into a state of denial.

Denial is a subtext of “Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare.” The book’s editors, Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian, present a series of lucid, expert essays on the experiences of conventional military forces adapting to an insurgency. The contributors discuss the British in Ireland, Palestine and Malaya; the French in Vietnam and Algeria; the Israelis in the West Bank; and the Americans in all sorts of places. Over and over again, the story is one of a disastrously slow, grudging effort to grasp the kind of war that needs to be fought…