Military Review

Beyond Guns and Steel: Reviving the Nonmilitary Instruments of American Power

In important respects, the great struggles of the 20th century-World War I and World War II and the Cold War-covered over conflicts that had boiled and seethed and provoked wars and instability for centuries before 1914: ethnic strife, religious wars, independence movements, and, especially in the last quarter of the 19th century, terrorism. Unfortunately, the dangers and challenges of old have been joined by new forces of instability and conflict, among them * A new and more malignant form ...

U.S. Africa Command: A New Strategic Paradigm?

AFRICOM originated as an internal administrative change within DOD that remedies an outdated arrangement left over from me Cold War, in the words of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.2 Or, in the words of Ambassador Robert Loftis, the former senior State Department member of the AFRICOM transition team, it was created because Africa is more important to us strategically and deserves to be viewed through its own lens.

Operation Mountain Lion: Cjtf-76 in Afghanistan, Spring 2006

To do this, CJTF-76 had to- * Establish combat outposts to extend combat power throughout the area targeted for a holding operation. * Deny the enemy sanctuary, bringing a measure of immediate security to the people. * Oversee the development of relatively competent indigenous security forces capable of controlling battlespace and enforcing the law. * Help stand up Afghan Government agencies that would respond to the needs of the population. Mountain Lion pitted U.S. Army and Marine Corps in...

Protection of Arts and Antiquities During Wartime: Examining the Past and Preparing for the Future

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a message to troops on the eve of the Normandy Invasion ON 10 APRIL 2003, one day after the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Firdaus Square, representing the fall of Baghdad to U.S. forces, looters plundered Iraq's National Museum. Looting of the Baghdad Museum In stark contrast to the successful efforts to protect art and antiquities during World War II, the plundering of the National Museum in Baghdad represented a failure to adequately plan and pre...

Northern Ireland: A Balanced Approach to Amnesty, Reconciliation, and Reintegration

Background After power devolved from the U.K. Government to the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1920, the side in favor of political union with the United Kingdom, the unionists (mainly Protestants), dominated.7 Their opposition, the nationalists (mainly Catholics), desired political union with the Republic of Ireland, from which they derived much of their strength.8 Considerable animosity existed between the two communities, with the unionists discriminating against the nationalists in voting r...

The Rule of Law for Commanders

2 It is perhaps intuitive for Army officers to consider Krulak's three block war as being comprised of at least two distinct, separate parts: combat operations, executed by combat units to defeat armed insurgents; and stability operations, performed by civil affairs units and civilian agencies like the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to support, stabilize, and reconstruct fragmented societies.3 Such thinking flows naturally from the Army's p...

International Law and Slavery

A Short History of Slavery The historian John Keegan notes that no one knows how and when slavery and the slave trade began, but he speculates that it was probably a common part of the social order for early pastoralists and steppe peoples, and it likely intensified with the advent of the war chariot in the second millennium BCE.1 Slavery was prevalent throughout the ancient world; the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, and Roman civilizations developed laws and customs to legitimize and...

Monitoring and Evaluation of Department of Defense: Humanitarian Assistance Programs

Civilian U.S. Government agencies evaluate the effectiveness of their programs through monitoring and evaluation (M&E), but equivalent analyses of DOD humanitarian assistance programs have been either ad hoc or entirely lacking.1 "Monitoring" is the ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, and use of data during the course of a project.2 "Evaluation" is the periodic review of program activity, outcome, and impact, with an emphasis on lessons learned.3 This article presents the case that ...

Threat Analysis: Organized Crime and Narco-Terrorism in Northern Mexico

Born in a struggle to overthrow a vicious dictator for lofty social and political objectives, the PRI became little more than a tool successive presidents and party leaders used to protect the property and privileges of the ruling class at the expense of the Mexican masses, mainly persons of indigenous or mestizo descent.6 During the PRI's long period of dominance, the methods it used for maintaining its power remained somewhat obscured from international public view. The government now must...

Making Sense of War: Strategy for the 21st Century

Overall, however, Making Sense of War would be an excellent text for an undergraduate or even graduate course on the military as political instrument, or for the military novice interested in a thoughtful, "wave-top" understanding of military strategy and its implications.

The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End

A former ambassador with nationbuilding experience, Peter Galbraith concludes his landmark study of a nation on the edge of collapse with a definitive solution: separate Iraq into ethnically centric, semi-autonomous regions governed by a central, broad-based confederation.

Take Down: The 3rd Infantry Division's Twenty-One Day Assault On Baghdad

According to author Jim Lacey, "What the soldiers of the 3d Infantry Division collectively accomplished [during Operation Iraqi Freedom] should be ranked as one of the greatest military achievements of all time," and his combat narrative, Take Down, sets out to prove his point.

The War I Always Wanted: The Illusion of Glory and the Reality of War: A Screaming Eagle in Afghanistan and Iraq

Only weeks after 9/11, Brandon Friedman, a rifle platoon leader and a heavy weapons company executive officer with the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division, deployed first to Pakistan, then Afghanistan, where he engaged Al-Qaeda fighters.

The Rising Tide

Shaara makes the point that Rommel would have won his North African campaign had he received the ammunition and gasoline he requested, suggesting that what a commander wants to do and what he can do are limited by fuel, ammunition, and equipment, an obvious point often forgotten by armchair generals.

Boy Soldier: Budapest, 1944-1945

Many combat memoirs of World War II were written by ordinary people with much the same tale to tell, but Boy Soldier is a unique and extraordinary story. The book provides a look into certain aspects of a major urban fight: the care of the trapped civilian population; the collapse of social and city services with resultant disease and starvation; the recruitment and training of irregular forces and militias; the coordination and cooperation problems between irregular forces and foreign milit...

Mr Letters

The policy recommendations run counter to stated U.S. goals supporting democratization efforts in the hemisphere, as codified by the mission statement and strategy of the regional Combatant Command, U.S. Southern Command. Stating that U.S. foreign policy is undemocratic flies in the face of over 20 years of quiet, but relentless, diplomatic and economic pressure to transform the hemisphere from authoritarian regimes into representative governments, the only exception being Cuba.

Insights

Iraq: The Way Ahead

[...] contrary to assumptions under-girding our invasion, it now seems clear that Iraqi Arabs, the product of a tribal society, have little interest in establishing an American-style democracy or a Middle Eastern version of Switzerland where German, French, and Italian speaking citizens live in harmony. Politicians who advocate immediate wimdrawal are either grandstanding for uninformed voters or demonstrating an appalling ignorance of history, economics, international relations, and nationa...

Redefining Insurgency

The current Joint Publication (JP) 1-02 definition of insurgency as "an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict" is too narrow in scope to apply to current situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The current JP definition worked well in the late 20th century, when anti-colonial and communist movements were competing with sitting governments for political power. Anotiier option is to keep the definition of insurgency ...

Book Reviews

Terrorism Financing and State Responses: A Comparative Perspective

The book attempts, in the editors' words, a "comprehensive assessment of the state of our knowledge about the nature of terrorism financing, the evolution of terrorist strategies and government responses, and the effectiveness of both." Several authors describe the flow of money into terrorist hands through the channels of haalwa (informal money transfer networks) and zakat (charitable giving practices prescribed by the Qur'an).

Ungoverned Territories

Such is the world that we live in, according to the authors of Ungoverned Territories, a RAND study commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to explain "the conditions that give rise to ungoverned territories and their effects on U.S. security interests" and to develop "strategies to allow the U.S. to mitigate the effects-specifically to reduce the threat posed by terrorists operating from these territories."

Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qa'ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad

Many analysts were frustrated by a perceived anti-Serb bias in the upper ranks of President Bill Clinton's administration. Unholy Terror challenges those who support the idea that Bosniacs were only innocent victims of religious hatred stirred by Slobodan Milosevic.

Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry On the American Homefront Since 1941

Situated in what has been known loosely as the peace movement, it contributes to society's broader pattern of literary and journalistic expression, deconstructing the official narrative of our wartime presidential administrations to offer a "collective subjectivity other than the nation-state" with its state-sanctioned patriotic lyric. Metres culled hundreds of sources and includes excerpts of dozens of poems to illustrate that war-resistance poetry serves American society by producing "coun...

Sea Change at Annapolis: The United States Naval Academy, 1949-2000

To be sure, a more inclusive admissions policy and elimination of compulsory church attendance can be identified as "progressive," given the rigid traditionalism of the Academy, yet they were implemented under political duress and decades after they occurred in the broader military and in other colleges.

800 Days On the Eastern Front/Red Partisan: The Memoir of a Soviet Resistance Fighter On the Eastern Front

When studying the struggle between the Soviets and the Germans on the Eastern Front, it is all too easy to get lost in the titanic size and scope of the conflict. Personal and individual experiences of the war tend to be lost in the sweep of fronts and army groups. In the Soviet case, this submersion of first-hand accounts has been exacerbated by language barriers, state censorship, and Cold War tensions.

15 Stars: Eisenhower, Macarthur, Marshall: Three Generals Who Saved the American Century

Three Generals Who Saved the American Century, Stanley Weintraub, Free Press, New York, 2007, 541 pages. $30.00 This very readable book is a collective biography of three five-star generals identified in the subtitle. It concentrates on World War II, when they jointly acquired those fifteen stars, although it also covers the generals' prewar backgrounds and postwar careers. 15 Stars mixes portraits of the men and a cast of surrounding characters with discussions of high strategy: the cross-c...

Civil War Leadership and Mexican War Experience

Besides not taking into account other events that may also have helped form the leaders' Civil War personas, such as the 12 years of interwar experience spent protecting the Overland Routes or attempting to quell sectional bloodlettings in Kansas, Dougherty makes some incredible leaps to conclude that Mexican War events were relevant to Civil War operations. case in point: he links future Union general Jefferson C. Davis's witnessing of a confrontation between his Mexican War regimental and b...

3rd Place: Depuy Writing Competition

The New Legs Race: Critical Perspectives On Biometrics in Iraq

4 Biometric identification technologies include but are not limited to fingerprinting (in use since the 19th century), iris and retinal scanning, face and voice recognition, gait analysis, and implantable radio frequency identification devices (RFID).5 While each are powerful advances in their own rights, these technologies are most effective when combined to construct multimodal profiles of humans that can be stored in interoperable, networked databases like the Department of Defense Biometr...

4th Place: Depuy Writing Competition

Finding America's Role in a Collapsed North Korean State

North Korea has been a U.S. adversary responsible for the deaths of thousands of American service members over the past 55 years, and it is the only country in the world that holds a commissioned U.S. naval vessel hostage.1 It also possesses stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, has an advanced ballistic missile program, and recently detonated a nuclear weapon. In his view, it will not be a single event, but rather a process with seven identifiable phases: * Depletion of resources. ...

3rd Place: Macarthur Writing Contest

On Luck and Leadership

It occurred only twice in FM 6-22's predecessor, FM 22-100 (also titled Army Leadership)-once in a discussion on organizational leaders, where it states that "failing through want of experience or luck is forgivable"; the other, in an example used to illustrate implied missions.6 The old leadership FM seems to imply that, in the absence of success, an officer might claim bad luck as a plausible excuse.

2nd Place: Io Writing Contest

Merging Information Operations and Psychological Operations

Consider this excerpt from Joint Publication (JP) 3-53, Doctrine for Joint Psychological Operations: Strategic PSYOP are international information activities conducted by U.S. Government agencies to influence foreign attitudes, perceptions, and behavior in favor of U.S. goals and objectives during peacetime and in times of conflict. Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-3, Commissioned Officer Professional Development and Career Management: * Psychological Operations officers possess expertise...