David H. Ucko

Obama’s COIN Toss
Eliot A. Cohen, The Washington Post – December 5, 2009

“David Ucko’s “The New Counterinsurgency Era” is a dense, scholarly and useful work on how the American military adapted to counterinsurgency during the Iraq war, both on the ground and in the classrooms of Fort Leavenworth, where most of the Army’s thinking gets done. The book captures the Army’s self-inflicted amnesia about counterinsurgency in the wake of Vietnam and the difficult steps needed to relearn old lessons”.

Presentation on U.S. Doctrine for Counterinsurgency
Naval War College – November 18, 2009
The Naval War College (NWC) has posted the videos from the conference ‘Irregular Warfare: Nasty, Brutish but not Short’, held at Newport, RI, in September 2009. All of the panels are now available on here. You can view my own presentation on U.S. military doctrine for counterinsurgency by clicking the video below:

Book Club: A Special Abu Muqawama Interview with David Ucko
Abu Muqawama – November 6, 2009
“In contrast, one of the more consequential arguments against counterinsurgency concerns balance and the need for the U.S. military to master the full spectrum of operations. Counterinsurgency places specific and extremely challenging demands on the force: not only to provide civil control and civil security, but to restore essential services, provide support to governance, as well as aid economic and infrastructural development. Can the capability to do this be developed within the force without seriously undermining its ability to conduct combined arms manoeuvre and other aspect of conventional war-fighting? The Army wants its soldiers to be adaptive, but can we expect a soldier to be both a war-fighter as well as the jack-of-all-trades called for in stability operations? Is it a fair requirement and, as important, can it at all be avoided?”

IA-Forum Interview: David Ucko
International Affairs Forum – September, 2009
“On the notion that learning counterinsurgency is learning to fight the last war, I think a realistic outlook on trends such as urbanization shows that, whenever you have an expeditionary force being deployed, they will operate in cities and foreign cultures and foreign languages, facing enemies that would be really foolish to confront the U.S. military in a conventional manner and will instead resort to the same types of tactics we see in Iraq and Afghanistan. All of this points to a future of operations that may not be necessarily counterinsurgency operations per se, but that will call for very similar skill sets and capabilities and that’s why I think the learning of counterinsurgency is really just the learning of how to conduct modern wars.”

RAND Analyst Says Pentagon Needs to ‘Institutionalize’ CI Doctrine
CQ HOMELAND SECURITY – September 11, 2009
“Every 20-30 years, the United States squanders the ‘hard-learned lessons’ of previous wars where the enemy used unconventional tactics because of a failure to ‘institutionalize’ those lessons, said David Ucko, a fellow at the RAND Corp. and author of  ‘The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the U.S. Military for Modern Wars.’”

Levin Does Not Plan To Legislate Quickening Expansion of Afghan Security Forces
CQ HOMELAND SECURITY – September 11, 2009
“David Ucko, a fellow at the RAND Corp., said sending more troops in and of itself would not be enough; the United States needs to ‘have a clear understanding of what the troops need to do.’”

Fighting Today’s Insurgencies
Georgetown University Press News Release – July 23, 2009
“With a Department of Defense that failed to implement effective institutional change based on the lessons learned in Vietnam, what are the chances that these lessons relearned today will finally influence the direction of the Pentagon’s policy and procedure?”

Misplaced Military Priorities
Andrew Exum, The Guardian: Comment Is Free – April 16, 2008
“A recent paper by David Ucko argues that – almost seven years after 9/11 – defence spending priorities are still overwhelmingly weighted toward conventional, high-tech weapons systems that anticipate a future threat from China more than they do the very real and current threat posed by insurgent groups.”

David Ucko on Learning Counterinsurgency
Abu Muqawama Blog – March 24, 2008
“Everyone has been talking up David Ucko’s new article in Orbis — Innovation or Inertia: The U.S. Military and the Learning of Counterinsurgency. Michael Noonan, Frank Hoffman, and the Insurgency Research Group have all recommended it. On the Small Wars Journal blog, Hoffman had this to say…”

An Outsider’s Perspective
Frank Hoffman, Small Wars Journal – March 24, 2008
“I think the SWJ community will benefit from the attached essay by Dr. David Ucko, who recently completed his doctoral work at King’s College London. This well-crafted essay has just been published by Orbis, the policy journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. It’s an objective assessment of where the United States stands in our adaptation to counterinsurgency and irregular warfare, from an outsider’s perspective.”