David H. Ucko

Stéphane Taillat, of the En Vérité blog, and Georges-Henri Brivet des Vallons have helped compiled the latest issue of Sécurité Globale, which focuses in part on counterinsurgency and irregular warfare. The issue brings together English- and French-speaking researchers on these topic, including Michel Goya, whose piece on Afghanistan and the U.S. military I mentioned in [...]

I am normally deeply sceptical of any report that appears to sell a technological fix to the deep complexities of counterinsurgency and stability operations, but I am going to make an important exception to that rule to bring attention to this recent RAND publication on non-lethal technology. Cleverly entitled ‘Underkill’ and authored by a team [...]

The latest issue of the Journal of Military History contains, among a great many things, a review I wrote of Mark Moyar’s latest book, A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq (Yale University Press). Given the amount of discussion of Moyar’s book online (here, here, and here), I asked and received [...]

Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security featured The New Counterinsurgency Era on his blog, Abu Muqawama. He asked me some very important and very difficult questions about the U.S. military’s learning of counterinsurgency, and where I see this process going in the next few years. You may also be interested in [...]

Bruce C. Jones, Shepard Forman and Richard Gowan, all of the Center for International Cooperation, New York University, have published a great edited volume on the changing U.S. relation to multilateral institutions since the Cold War, with particular emphasis on the changes brought on by the 9/11 attacks and by the events that they provoked. [...]

I was really taken by this paper on Operation Arrowhead Ripper in Iraq, in which Colonel Fred Johnson talks about his 15-month tour as the Deputy Commander of 3-2 Stryker Brigade Combat Team (SBCT) and comments on its configuration, as stands, for operations across the spectrum.
Certainly from the lay-out of its structure, and from anecdotal [...]

My colleague and friend Mats Berdal, professor of security and development at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, has just published Building Peace After War, an IISS Adelphi Book, which is very much worth the read. All you with Athens log-in details can access the material online here. To me, this is really [...]