The challenge of counterinsurgency warfare is not new. From the Philippines a century ago to Iraq today, American soldiers have repeatedly struggled in open-ended, ambiguous, low-level combat against small bands of guerrillas. The U.S. military has tended to deemphasize these conflicts in its institutional memory, however, so that it has often fallen to American soldiers in the field to relearn, the hard way, the logic of small wars.
What lessons should the U.S. military draw from past counterinsurgency campaigns as it fights the global war on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere? Why did United States prevail in the Philippines in the 1890s and El Salvador in the 1980s? Why did it lose Vietnam? Can past successes be replicated and past mistakes avoided?
These and other questions will be the subject of an AEI panel discussion. Participants will include Colonel Robert Killebrew, U.S. Army (Ret.), an infantry officer with extensive counterinsurgency experience; Brian McAllister Linn, visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center and historian of the Philippines War; Steven Metz, chairman of the regional strategy and planning department at the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College and author of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in the 21st Century; and Kalev Sepp, assistant professor at the Center on Terrorism and Irregular Warfare at the Naval Postgraduate School. Thomas Donnelly, AEI resident fellow in defense and security policy, will moderate.
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