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Article: Relearning counterinsurgency warfare.
- Article from:
- Parameters
- Article date:
- March 22, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 U.S. Army War College. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Thirty years after the signing of the January 1973 Paris peace agreement ending the Vietnam War, the United States finds itself leading a broad coalition of military forces engaged in peacemaking, nation-building, and now counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq. A turning point appeared in mid-October 2003 when US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's memo on the future of Iraqi operations surfaced. His musings about whether US forces were ready for protracted guerrilla warfare sparked widespread debate about US planning for counterinsurgency operations.
Little attention has been paid to the theory and practice of counterinsurgency warfare in mainstream strategic ...