Fighting Small Wars In The New Century

The offering of inducements manifestly does little to improve the political trajectory on the ground. All wars are ultimately decided by the re-distribution of political power and that is in turn decided by the bargaining power that each of the belligerents brings to the negotiating table. This essay argues that the same unifying hedgehog idea, annihilation, is equally applicable to countering insurgencies and is the only available mechanism to resolve the complexity we face. Annihilation can be aggressive operations to destroy the military capacity of the insurgents or to deny insurgents the opportunity to apply its military capacity to the population. Both are paths to the establishment of control over the operating environment. There will be a time when reconstruction and other aid will begin to produce dividends and that time will be marked by the establishment of security.

Link to paper here.