Journal

Sunday marked the 50th Anniversary of President Johnson’s signature of the Joint Resolution to promote the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia.

When done effectively, narratives can award meaning to physical fights.  When done poorly, they can eradicate even the hardest won territorial gains.

Four years into the United States military’s effort to counter the Lord’s Resistance Army in central Africa its leader, Joseph Kony, remains elusive.

Northern Mali Conflict 2012: How Algerian Militants Transformed into an Al-Qaeda Affiliate and Penetrated an Ethnic Cleavage to Remain Relevant.

This is an opinion and a reflection on the current state of affairs and possible future trends regarding the West’s involvement in numerous irregular wars and revolutions.

To achieve relative stability in Afghanistan we need to adopt a long-term, small-footprint, Remote Area Foreign Internal Defense (FID) strategy.

The armed forces of the Caliphate have finally resolved most of the issues left unresolved when the Iraqis wrote their constitution in 2005.

The influence of family, ethnic and religious-based networks is an important component of the Nigerian political and social landscape.

The assassinations of high profile Muslim clerics in Mombasa over a period of two years has elevated that coastal city’s status as a critical battleground in Kenya’s war on terror.

Military operations in an urban area are not normally thought of as a “Small Wars” concern, yet they are an important capability that will remain relevant.

Over the past year, the vitality of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan’s insurgency has waxed and waned but the group has still managed to define Pakistan’s security landscape.

This paper details the March 2013 takeover of Raqqa by Syrian rebels and the subsequent rebel infighting.

Just like on land we must be prepared to face both conventional and asymmetric foes ) as a similar challenge is arising at sea.

This is the Spanish language version of John Sullivan’s earlier SWJ article “Explosive Escalation? Reflections on the Car Bombing in Ciudad Juarez”.

 "What is the proper relationship between militaries and non-governmental organizations."

American generals who thought that they could talk the President into extending the Surge were sadly mistaken.

The recent return to US custody of Bowe Bergdahl, following his June 30, 2009 disappearance, has generated a substantial amount of debate and controversy.

This is the third and last essay in the series that examines the rising threat of organized criminality and its spillover effects across levels of analysis.

The literature on NGOs includes very little about NGO-military relationships in troubled areas.

Domestic law enforcement methods and strategies are pressed continuously to evolve and adapt so as to address the ever increasing interconnectedness – globalization – of criminal enterprises.

This article asserts that if organizational leaders focus on human-to-human interface points for easier integration, it will lay the foundational logic needed to allow for collaboration to occur.

Among the varied personalities exposed by the tensions of war, the Spartan commander Brasidas emerges as a definitive figure who illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of not only his city-state’s “national character,” but also that of their great enemy, Athens.

The purpose of this second essay is to develop our analytical framework in more depth and provide a detailed analysis.

As the United States and its coalition partners prepare to withdraw from Afghanistan, America should come to embrace a more proactive foreign policy vis-à-vis the “Stans”.

Organized criminal groups have expanded their networks and employed technology in novel and startling ways to counteract efforts to detect, disrupt, and capture them.

Iran today poses a potential threat not only to the region, but also to the international community.

After a decade spent in the shadow of the Afghan Taliban, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan claimed ownership over increasingly frequent waves of violence.

What is setting the current influx of migrants apart is the sheer number of unaccompanied children who make up the majority of the tidal wave.

The feedback and analysis system along with metrics used by the US and ISAF to quantify measures of success in Afghanistan has been disproportionately focused on enemy related activity.

The purpose of this paper is to describe social science research methods employed in Afghanistan during 2011-2012 and to report their use to clarify social issues related to conflict.

Community policing is a paradigm within law enforcement suggesting that most issues are best dealt with proactively at the community level through collaborative engagement.

What is important for the Joint force to understand is that social structures are not the stable, highly integrated, and harmonious systems as presented on a map.

Despite the scope of the threat to Mexico’s security, violent drug-trafficking organizations are not well understood, and optimal strategies to combat them have not been identified.

As potentially the ‘first counterinsurgency victory of the twenty-first century’, the Sri Lankan experience turns much of this conventional wisdom on its head.

The emergence of autodefensas (self-defense} or vigilante groups in Mexico has far-reaching international implications that may not be readily visible.

Fighting Fire with Fire: Texas Rangers and Counterinsurgency in the 1847 Mexico City Campaign

Given the exponential growth and popularity of digital fabrication, also known colloquially as 3D printing, it is timely to question the implications that it holds for state security.

Malcolm Gladwell uses high pressure defense as a metaphor for insurgency in his newest book, David and Goliath. The lesson he draws is that the weaker party should always choose asymmetric strategies.

Coordination Failures Among Mexican Security Forces: How the Mexican Government Botched the War on Drugs

Afghan sovereignty and future prosperity requires a more effective security force that is locally trained and fielded, and solely funded by Afghanistan.

A key question going unanswered is whether “The Clash of Civilizations” is still a driving force in current and future operational environments.

How the US Army thinks about strategy, thinking which is unavoidably  influenced by how the word strategy is defined, bears on how institutions will imagine, explain, and prepare ‘landpower’.

The new COIN manual retains a section on “Legal Considerations,” upgrading it from an appendix to its own chapter.

Continue on for three loosely related articles meant to inspire novel thought on military operations in the growing urban landscapes of the future.

The seventh anniversary of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict provides a critical opportunity to evaluate the global effect in a number of dimensions.

Committing months and years at a time to mentoring individuals and organizations takes a specific set of personality and character traits.

In this article, I undertake an analysis of the military-to-military components of the United States’ security assistance program in Morocco. 

Echoes of past tensions between the U.S. and Russia are again playing out on the international stage as we are bombarded by an increase in Cold War, anti-American type rhetoric.

U.S. Policymakers have generally accepted as essential and uncontested fact that poverty and terrorism are directly and causally linked.

Thinking About Thinking About the Army’s Future: Paradigms and the Wicked Problem of “Landpower”