Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since September 11, 2001, the United States has faced daunting challenges in the areas of foreign policy and national security. Threatened by failing states, insurgencies, civil wars, and terrorism, the nation has been compelled to re-evaluate its traditional responses to global conflict. In this timely book, John T. Fishel and Max G. Manwaring present a much-needed strategy for conducting unconventional warfare in an increasingly violent world. In the early 1990s, Manwaring introduced a new paradigm for addressing low-intensity conflicts, or conflicts other than major wars. Termed the Manwaring Paradigm or SWORD (Small Wars Operations Research Directorate) model, it has been tested successfully by scholars and practitioners and refined in the wake of new and significant “uncomfortable wars” around the world, most notably the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Uncomfortable Wars Revisited broadens the definition of the original paradigm and applies it to specific confrontations
This book will help civilian and military leaders, opinion makers, scholars, and interested citizens come to grips with the realities of the 21st-century global security arena by dissecting lessons from both the past and the present. This book sets out to accomplish four tasks: first, to outline the evolution of the national and international security concept from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) to the present; second, to examine the circular relationship of the elements that define contemporary security; third, to provide empirical examples to accompany the discussion of each elementsecurity, development, governance, and sovereignty; and fourth, to argue that substantially more sophisticated stability-security concepts, policy structures, and policy-making precautions are required in order for the United States to play more effectively in the global security arena. Case studies provide the framework to join the various chapters of the book into a cohesive narrative, while the theoretical linear analytic method it employs defines its traditional approach to case studies. For each case study it discusses the issue in context, findings and outcomes of the issue, and conclusions and implications. Issue and Context sections outline the political-historical situation and answers the "What?" question; Findings and Outcome sections answer the "Who?", "Why?", "How?", and "So What?" questions; and Conclusions and Implications sections address Key Points and Lessons.
New insights for understanding and combating Al Qaeda and other contemporary security threats Wars were once fought mainly between nations—a presumption put to rest on September 11, 2001. Al Qaeda showed that nonstate actors could threaten a traditional nation-state and pursue strategic objectives without conventional weaponry, thereby altering the nature of war and often rendering military firepower meaningless. National security expert Max G. Manwaring examines the emergence of nonstate actors in a geopolitical world. Manwaring invites policy makers to look past familiar insurgencies such as those in Vietnam and Iraq and consider global security problems from multiple perspectives. He concludes that the use of calculated political and psychological power may be the most effective response in many situations. The power to make war no longer rests solely in the hands of traditional governments. Manwaring analyzes the context, conduct, and outcome of today’s irregular wars and applies proven methods of effective response to seven case studies: Colombia, Al Qaeda, Portugal, Uruguay, Venezuela, Italy, and Central American gangs and criminal organizations. Insurgency, Terrorism, and Crime translates the cogent lessons of recent events into workable strategies for tomorrow’s leaders. This book is required reading for students of national security policy and foreign-policy analysis.
Dr. Max Manwaring wrote this monograph in response to the fact that today over half the countries in the global community are faced with one variation or another of asymmetric guerrilla war. Insurgencies, internal wars, and other small-scale contingencies (SSCs) are the most pervasive and likely type of conflict in the post-Cold War era. That the United States will become involved directly or indirectly in some of these conflicts is almost certain. The Balkans, Colombia, Mexico, Somalia, and the Philippines are only a few cases in point. Yet, little or no recognition and application of the strategic-level lessons of the Vietnam War and the hundreds of other smaller conflicts that have taken place over the past several years are evident.
Today more than one hundred small, asymmetric, and revolutionary wars are being waged around the world. This book provides invaluable tools for fighting such wars by taking enemy perspectives into consideration. The third volume of a trilogy by Max G. Manwaring, it continues the arguments the author presented in Insurgency, Terrorism, and Crime and Gangs, Pseudo-Militaries, and Other Modern Mercenaries. Using case studies, Manwaring outlines vital survival lessons for leaders and organizations concerned with national security in our contemporary world. The insurgencies Manwaring describes span the globe. Beginning with conflicts in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s and El Salvador in the 1980s, he goes on to cover the Shining Path and its resurgence in Peru, Al Qaeda in Spain, popular militias in Cuba, Haiti, and Brazil, the Russian youth group Nashi, and drugs and politics in Guatemala, as well as cyber warfare. Large, wealthy, well-armed nations such as the United States have learned from experience that these small wars and insurgencies do not resemble traditional wars fought between geographically distinct nation-state adversaries by easily identified military forces. Twenty-first-century irregular conflicts blur traditional distinctions among crime, terrorism, subversion, insurgency, militia, mercenary and gang activity, and warfare. Manwaring’s multidimensional paradigm offers military and civilian leaders a much needed blueprint for achieving strategic victories and ensuring global security now and in the future. It combines military and police efforts with politics, diplomacy, economics, psychology, and ethics. The challenge he presents to civilian and military leaders is to take probable enemy perspectives into consideration, and turn resultant conceptions into strategic victories.
The author of this monograph, Dr. Max Manwaring, examines a cogent case that illustrates how would-be revolutionaries all around the world might seek to realize their dreams. They would include populists and neo-populists; the New Left, New Socialists, and 21st Century Socialists; criminal nonstate actors, agitators, gangs, and popular militias; and other "modern mercenaries.
This volume aims to operationalize General John R. Galvin's call for a new paradigm to fight the most prevalent form of conflict in the world today-insurgency. It contributes to the understanding needed to formulate and implement efforts in the contemporary international security arena.
Departing from conventional policy rhetoric on the unconventional "new world disorder," Max G. Manwaring, Wm. J. Olson, and their colleagues here build upon Ambassador David C. Miller, Jr.'s three pillars of success for foreign policy and military management. They provide a sound intellectual road map through the dense fog of the contemporary inter
This book addresses the challenge of international narcotics control by applying "the Manwaring paradigm." The paradigm is the basis for an improved strategy and theory of engagement for weak governments of the developing world, built around the concept of the "gray area phenomenon.
The author discusses how a new and dangerous dynamic, a private military organization called the Zetas, has been inserted into the already crowded Mexican and Western Hemisphere security arena. The Zetas were originally organized and staffed by former members (deserters) from the Mexican Army's veteran elite Airborne Special Forces Group (GAFES). The author contends that the Zetas are better trained, equipped, motivated, and experienced in irregular warfare than the Mexican police and army. This monograph intends to promote a relevant response to the problem of the "guerrillas next door" to the United States.
This monograph explores the complex protean character and hegemonic role of gangs operating as state and nonstate surrogates in the contemporary asymmetric and irregular global security arena. Gangs come in different types with different motives, and with different modes of action. Examples include Venezuela's institutionalized "popular militias," Colombia's devolving paramilitary criminal or warrior bands (bandas criminales), and al-Qaeda's loosely organized networks of propaganda-agitator gangs operating in Spain and elsewhere in Western Europe. Motives and actions of these diverse groups are further complicated by their evershifting alliances with insurgents, transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), drug cartels, warlords, governments that want to maintain a plausible denial of aggressive action, and any other state or nonstate actor that might require the services of a mercenary gang organization or surrogate. Lessons derived from these cases demonstrate how gangs might fit into a holistic effort to compel radical political-social change, and illustrate how traditional political-military objectives may be achieved indirectly, rather than directly. These lessons are significant beyond their own domestic political context in that they are harbingers of many of the "wars among the people" that have emerged out of the Cold War, and are taking us kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
This monograph begins with a short discussion of contemporary insurgency. It makes the argument that, in studying terror war, guerrilla war, or any other common term for insurgency war, we find these expressions mischaracterize the activities of armed groups that are attempting to gain political control of a nation-state. The fact is that these organizations are engaged in a highly complex political-psychological war. Three key harbinger cases from which the first contemporary lessons of modern insurgency should have been learned provide the basis for the argument--Peru (1962 to date), Italy (1968-82), and Argentina (1969-79). Given that these kinds of conflict--or mutations--are likely to continue to challenge U.S. and other global leadership over the next several years, it is important to understand them. In this connection, it is also important to understand that the final results of insurgency or counterinsurgency are never determined by arms alone. Rather, a successful counterinsurgency depends on a holistic process that relies on civilian and military agencies and contingents working together in an integrated fashion to achieve a mutually agreed political-strategic end game.
This is one in the Special Series of monographs stemming from the February 2001 conference on Plan Colombia cosponsored by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College and The Dante B. Fascell North-South Center of the University of Miami. In this monograph, Dr. Max G. Manwaring provides a comprehensive analysis of the Colombian crisis situation and makes viable recommendations to deal with it more effectively. In substantive U.S. national security terms, Dr. Manwaring addresses the questions, "Why Colombia, Why Now, and What Is To Be Done?" He explains the importance of that troubled country to the United States. He points out that the fragile democracy of Colombia is at risk, and that the violent spillover effects of three simultaneous wars pose a threat to the rest of the Western Hemisphere and the interdependent global community. Then Dr. Manwaring makes a case against continued tactical and operational approaches to the Colombian crisis and outlines what must be done.
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