Journal

As we look back on the third anniversary of the death of Qaddafi it is impossible to argue with the President’s self-assessment that his greatest foreign policy error was made in Libya. 

What if the U.S. military hasn’t been focusing on the wrong thing the whole time?

The anniversary of the Grenada invasion is a watershed for the United States by putting the Vietnam experience behind it as well as restoring the International respect it had lost over time.

Over the past several years the US Army has renewed its focus on mission command and a key component of mission command is the use of mission orders.

No amount of training, no matter how well we train our foreign allies, will be enough to defeat an enemy if there is no fundamental and cultural trust and commitment to that cause.

Leaders don’t operate in a vacuum; therefore, leadership can more accurately be viewed as an enterprise between the leader and the led.

Varying cases of foreign fighter have shed light on some of the incentives that have driven these individuals to take action and travel to the region.

The officer-involved shooting in Ferguson, Missouri and the civil unrest that followed has brought the issue of the increased “militarization” of American law enforcement to the fore.

The military’s lessons from a decade of war can be particularly useful for a domestic audience facing similar challenges.

It is the author’s view that the country of Colombia has evolved into what can be coined as an intractable conflict with the FARC-EP.

The roots of IS can be traced back to US’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, but its ideology belongs to that of al-Qaeda, the pillar of modern militant Islam.

The core issue at stake is that the propagation of Ebola is rooted in the long standing culture of corruption and the archaic traditional beliefs that still prevail.

In a world of over seven billion people, the human domain and civil concerns on the battlefield are not distracters to be ignored or sidestepped by the military.

With the US increasingly involved in counter-terror operations across the world, terrorist organizations have had to become more flexible and adaptive to their environment.

There are two leading concepts for how the U.S. should approach a future conflict with China: Air-Sea Battle and Offshore Control.

Altering politics so as to curtail suicide bombers, IEDs, and the like, may no longer be possible in this day and age and even undesirable under the terms it has to be achieved.

A comparison of World War II German and United States Army command cultures will reveal a chasm in the creativity, leadership, and execution capabilities of the officers involved.

The purpose of this paper is to explore cognitive errors leading to poor strategic-level U.S. military decision making and policy adoption.

American decision makers chose to fight to a high-consumption and high-cost war through conventional means rather than employing the unparalleled power of nuclear technology.

The attack began in small and unnoticed increments.  Quiet, stealthy infiltration in front of each position. Rats by the hundreds.

Many African soldiers are not accurate marksmen because they have problems seeing targets. Few African troops wear corrective eyewear or have access to eye examinations.

This essay argues that external support to the insurgents is usually a decisive factor in determining the outcome of an insurgency.

Guardians of the Machine - Defense Entrepreneurs Forum 2014.

In this article, we will highlight some of the operational mechanics involved in the Security Force Advise and Assist Team mission, and also provide key lessons learned.

The roles performed by U.S. Civil Affairs elements in Peru have changed dramatically in the past three years.  What began as operating out of the U.S. Embassy evolved to conducting field operations.

Modern counterinsurgency practice is fighting a new insurgency with new tactics based on old principles.

During mid-September, the IAG was kindly invited by the Deputy Prime Minister and commander of the northern front, to visit the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga forces north of Mosul.

The United States’ national adversaries are engaged in protracted unconventional warfare strategies designed to counter-balance U.S. military might.

There has been a lot of alarm spread about Ebola and the past weeks, and I am loathe to add fuel to the fire, but I am concerned about the possible weaponizing of Ebola by Islamic extremists.

Interview with Dr. John Nagl on his just released book Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice, The Penguin Press, New York, 2014.

The war in Cameroon remains little known and its very existence has been denied by official French spokesmen.

But UW Is Being Practiced Around The World By Those Who Are Interested In It

Southern Europe’s mass migration problem is out of control.  The U.S. government may be forced to address this fact sooner rather than later.

As the world watches the 2014 iteration of the Middle East conflict observers should remember that history is continuous rather than episodic.

The fundamentals of basic combat training are not new, only the specifics have changed.

I thought that I might build on the previous essay I wrote for DEF on how to develop an understanding of war and warfare through the study of military history in width, depth, and context.

Our current system of military operations is reaching a point where it is not producing options which fit the expectations of our civilian leaders and perhaps the conditions of 21st century war.

Army doctrine does not adequately address the relationship between transition, collaboration and risk.

The purpose of this research is to propose the initial stages of development of a construct of an actual information domain.

The ability to understand how and why insurgencies end can provide better insight for counterinsurgent stakeholders and for more accurate applied foreign policy prescriptions.

We arrive in late 2014 at a 1947-like institutional moment.

The conventional wisdom about strategic inertia, doing little or nothing, is that whatever might be done might make things worse.

This is an attempt at establishing the facts as to how Georgia’s armored capability fared against what emerged to be as the Russian 58th Army’s 19th Motor Rifle Division.

Network-centric warfare doctrine continues to fall short of revolutionizing the battlefield, even after a decade of upgrades born out of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The actions and consequences of the Venezuelan struggle extend to all of the countries of Central America, the Caribbean, and the northern Andes.  They will especially affect the chances for final resolution of the long-suffered Colombian war.

Posted today: The U.S. Army Operating Concept (AOC): Win in a Complex World

The Light Reconnaissance Strike Group is a break from the Army’s Cold War past and a bridge to the Army’s future in 21st Century Joint warfare.

As long as ISIL controls territory and shelters among civilian populations in easily fortified urban environments, a combined arms ground force will be required to root them out.

The 2014 QDR puts significant emphasis on the need to build capacity in foreign militaries and rely on those partners to both improve regional security and further US interests

Sufism in Asymmetric Warfare: Human Networks of the Somali Qadiriyya tariqa