Journal

Starting around 2008 Russia began providing military support to Nicaragua through the provision of funds, equipment and training.

This article argues that the recent resurgence of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham gained momentum during the Syrian civil war in 2011.

Understanding how the Islamic State fits the profile of a hybrid threat is integral to the development of unified strategies to counter them.

If you just give the Host Nation (HN) stuff or do stuff for them you become their system.

Have you ever read a military concept or doctrine publication, or an academic or professional paper about warfare or military operations, and wondered how it came to include such an ill-conceived idea?

The movement to understand the nature of Unconventional Warfare through the lens of Special Movement Theory is a continuing effort.

What is the purpose of civil-military guidelines?  Who are the authors and their intended audience?  What is the extent of their readership?  How can they help practitioners improve humanitarian outcomes?

Lessons learned from development efforts as well as practitioners’ perspective and observations on the effectiveness of DOD’s efforts to train and advise foreign security forces.

If historical examples are any indicator irregular warfare will remain a part of current and future conflicts.

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.