What to Read on Fighting Insurgencies
What to Read on Fighting Insurgencies – Eliot A. Cohen, Foreign Affairs.
Interest in counterinsurgency comes and goes. During the 1950s and 1960s, soldiers, politicians, and scholars wrote voluminously on what was sometimes called “revolutionary war,” a supposedly new mode of conflict that enabled nationalist and communist movements (and some combinations of the two) to thwart or even defeat seemingly stronger European colonial powers. The Vietnam War generated a rich literature on the topic, but attention waned with the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina and the American desire to avoid irregular warfare in the future. In recent years, however, hard experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq have rekindled interest in the subject and caused even some experts to reconsider old ways of waging “the war of the flea.”
Continue on for Eliot Cohen’s recommended reading at Foreign Affairs.
Two books that began my interest in the study of counter-insurgency were The Ugly American and the Small Wars Manual (Reprint of 1940 Edition). Although both may seem dated, I was able to extract valuable information from both that have helped me in my 24 years of service.