A lost work of El Lobo: Lieutenant-Colonel Charles T.R. Bohannan's unpublished study of guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency in the Philippines, 1899–1955

Charles Ted Rutledge Bohannan (1914–1982) became an integral agent of US counterinsurgency operations during the early Cold War, contributing to both the success of the COIN effort to defeat the communist Huk insurgents in the Philippines and the stalled COIN efforts in Vietnam. In the early 1960s, he wrote a short and compact analysis of the US and Filipino experience of guerrilla warfare, from the Philippine–American war until the defeat of the Huk Rebellion. It was never published. Reprinted here, Bohannan's analysis of lessons learned makes a substantial contribution to the history of American ideas of unconventional warfare by an expert who contributed these lessons to the successful defeat of an insurgency in South East Asia.     

Building A New Luftwaffe: The United States Air Force and Bundeswehr Planning for Rearmament, 1950–60

Rearming Germany was a long and complicated process. It was especially difficult to create a new German air force. The army generals who dominated the Bundeswehr cadre did not even want an air force but rather a small arm air corps. Moreover, Adenauer's defense staff failed to adequately budget or plan for a new air force. As rearmament began, US Air Force leaders, working closely with the small Luftwaffe staff in West Germany's shadow Defense Ministry, basically took charge of the process to ensure that the Germans built a new Luftwaffe on the American model – a large, multipurpose force organized as an independent service and fully integrated into NATO. The first Bundesluftwaffe commanders allied themselves to the Americans, often in opposition to their army comrades, to overcome the political problems caused by Adenauer's poor defense planning and create a modern air force on American lines.     

Learning in counterinsurgency: what do we really know?

Since the publication in 2002 of John Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, organizational learning has been widely presumed an important ingredient for success in counterinsurgency. But sampling the literature from before and after this time shows remarkably little analytical treatment of the issue of learning and even confusion over what it may mean. This article considers the theories, hypotheses, research strategies, threats to validity, methods of measurement, treatments of time, and general lack of statistical analysis in the work to date and recommends a course for future research.     

Counterinsurgency or irregular warfare? Historiography and the study of ‘small wars’

This article argues that the history of irregular warfare provides a valuable analytical and critical perspective for the study of counterinsurgency campaigns and counterinsurgency doctrine. A focus on the history of irregular warfare highlights the close relationship between warfare in Europe and in the colonies. Moreover, it enables us to identify more exactly the intersection of multiple factors that lead to an escalation of violence in small wars. Finally, it also sheds light on the lack of strategic reflection on the use of irregular auxiliaries that is characteristic for many counterinsurgency campaigns.     

The Nepalese Army: From counterinsurgency to peacekeeping?

Can peacekeeping participation help reform military institutions in democratizing states? Drawing on evidence from Nepal – one of the world's largest troop contributors to UN peacekeeping operations – this essay illustrates that participation in peace missions can sometimes undermine security sector reform and deteriorate civil–military relations. Furthermore, this analysis shows that peacekeeping participation will not necessarily reorient troops away from their conventional internal roles (such as counterinsurgency) or improve civilian control over the armed forces. Hence, civilians can lose control over soldiers just as frequently when they are deployed overseas as when they are at home.     

Force protection and society

Wars have long been fought with a firm focus upon armies' domestic contexts. These socio-political foundations have underpinned decisions regarding embarking upon war as well the conduct of war itself. Of particular importance among liberal democracies is the emphasis which is now placed upon force protection; broadly conceived as the range of measures employed to ensure the protection of servicemen and women on operations. Decisions surrounding protective equipment, deployed locations and wartime activities all face detailed scrutiny in contemporary operating environments. The attitudes of the government, the military and the civilian population combine to create a complex and dynamic backdrop of harmony and tension to this most sensitive characteristic of modern wars.     

Size Still Matters: Explaining Sri Lanka’s Counterinsurgency Victory over the Tamil Tigers

The military effectiveness literature has largely dismissed the role of material preponderance in favor of strategic interaction theories. The study of counterinsurgency, in which incumbent victory is increasingly rare despite material superiority, has also turned to other strategic dynamics explanations like force employment, leadership, and insurgent/adversary attributes. Challenging these two trends, this paper contends that even in cases of counterinsurgency, material preponderance remains an essential—and at times the most important—factor in explaining battlefield outcomes and effectiveness. To test this, the paper turns to the case of the Sri Lankan state’s fight against the Tamil Tiger insurgency, a conflict which offers rich variation over time across six periods and over 25 years. Drawing on evidence from historical and journalistic accounts, interviews, memoirs, and field research, the paper demonstrates that material preponderance accounts for variation in military effectiveness and campaign outcomes (including military victory in the final campaign) better than strategic explanations. Additionally, a new quantitative data-set assembled on annual loss-exchange ratios demonstrates the superiority of materialist explanations above those of skill, human capital, and regime type.     

Violence in context: Mapping the strategies and operational art of irregular warfare

The malaise that the United States, and the West, have experienced in recent campaigns stems in large part from unclear thinking about war, its political essence, and the strategies needed to join the two. Instead, analysis and response are predicated on entrenched theoretical concepts with limited practical utility. The inadequacy of understanding has spawned new, and not so new, terms to capture unanticipated trends, starting with the re-discovery of “insurgency” and “counterinsurgency” and leading to discussion of “hybrid threats” and “gray-zone” operations. New terminology can help, but the change must go deeper. Challenging analytical orthodoxy, this article sets out a unifying approach for the study of political violence, or more accurately: violent politics. It provides a conceptual foundation that helps to make sense of recent shifts in warfare. In effect, it offers sorely needed theoretical insights into the nature of strategy and guides the process of responding to nontraditional threats.     

Equality and diversity in the British armed forces: progress,challenges and prospects

The UK's changing political and legal landscape since 2000 reflecting transformations in wider society have elevated equality and diversity (E&D) issues to prominence in the public sector, including in the British armed forces. This research highlights key developments in the British military in relation to E&D, focusing both on areas of progress, and on the challenges still confronting the Forces. The findings reveal that the Forces have made significant strides in advancing E&D through the implementation of a range of policy initiatives but the persistence of discrimination, developments in the wider environment and the dilemmas raised by the strands of age and disability pose challenges. The value of this research is to increase our understanding of diversity management in a public sector institution that has been under-researched and views itself as “different,” and will be of interest to policymakers, E&D practitioners and academics in the field.     

Spies,advisors, and grunts: Film portrayals of counterinsurgency in Vietnam

Vietnam was a complex conflict, which historians and political scientists have struggled to understand. Some of the bitterest disputes in the historiography revolve around the US approach to counterinsurgency in Vietnam. Many different facets of the war have received the attention of filmmakers, and an examination of their work suggests new ways of thinking about the conflict. This article considers film portrayals of three phases of the Vietnam War – firstly, the early period of ‘political action’, then the advisory period, and finally the Americanization of the war after 1965. It suggests that by examining the experiences of participants in each of these phases, Vietnam War cinema helps to illustrate the problems that faced various American approaches to counterinsurgency in the conflict. Combined with the importance of films in determining popular perceptions of both historical conflicts and counterinsurgency in general, it suggests that they are worthy subjects of study and critique.