Best Practices in Counterinsurgency

Abstract

We can discern best practices common to successful counterinsurgencies by studying the past century's insurgent wars. Historical analysis helps us understand the nature and continuities of insurgencies over time and in various cultural, political, and geographic settings. While this does not produce a template solution to civil wars and insurrections, the sum of these experiences, judiciously and appropriately applied, might help Iraq defeat its insurgency. Nations on every continent have experienced or intervened in insurgencies. Not counting military coups and territorially defined civil wars, there are 17 insurgencies we can study closely and 36 others that include aspects we can consider. Assessment reveals which counterinsurgency practices were successful and which failed. A strategic victory does not validate all the victor's operational and tactical methods or make them universally applicable, as America's defeat in Vietnam and its success in El Salvador demonstrate. In both cases, learning more from one's mistakes than one's achievements is a valid axiom. If we were to combine all the successful operational practices from a century of counterinsurgent warfare, the summary would suggest a campaign outline to combat the insurgency in present-day Iraq.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 132 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.