Politics & Society

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Revisiting Counterinsurgency
Daniel Branch and Elisabeth Jean Wood
Politics Society 2010; 38; 3
DOI: 10.1177/0032329209357880

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Special Section on Reconsidering Counterinsurgency
Politics & Society
38(1) 3­–14
Revisiting Counterinsurgency* © 2010 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permission: http://www.
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0032329209357880
http://pas.sagepub.com

Daniel Branch1 and Elisabeth Jean Wood2

Keywords
counterinsurgency, insurgency, military intervention, Iraq, Afghanistan

The United States eventually got it right in Iraq, according to many observers and policy
makers: counterinsurgency worked, and the lessons can be exported to Afghanistan and
beyond. In response to the increasing intensity and range of attacks by Taliban forces in
Afghanistan, in 2009 the U.S. sent in more troops and attempted to replicate the tactics
that “worked” in Iraq: “clear, hold, and build,” the effort to combine violence only
against insurgents with the building of local civilian institutions. Yet the setting for
counterinsurgency in Afghanistan differed dramatically from that in Iraq, which led to
debate among politicians and experts about the prospects of counterinsurgency in
Afghanistan and its likely costs in “blood and treasure.”
To persuade policy makers to embrace counterinsurgency over more conventional
alternatives in Iraq and then Afghanistan, advocates had sought to silence skepticism
based on the fear that the Vietnam “quagmire” would recur. Deflecting comparison with
Vietnam, these advocates argued that the dreaded quagmire could be sidestepped and
pointed instead to successful counterinsurgency campaigns by European colonial powers
and by the U.S. in various settings, including in El Salvador. Efforts to defeat insur-
gencies, the advocates of counterinsurgency claim, should seek to win the “hearts and
minds” of civilians by engaging in violence only against insurgents, delivering public
services (particularly security) to civilians, and carrying out needed reforms to gov-
ernment policy to sustain civilian loyalty and address grievances exploited by
insurgents.
But the very terms hearts and minds and quagmire suggest how hard it is to set
Vietnam aside. The articles that follow provide some of the reasons why. In this spe-
cial section, the authors reexamine three key cases often analyzed by advocates of the

1
University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
2
Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Corresponding Author:
Daniel Branch, History Department, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK
Email: d.p.branch@warwick.ac.uk

*This essay is the introduction to a special section of Politics & Society, “Reconsidering Counterinsurgency.”

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4 Politics & Society 38(1)

new counterinsurgency doctrine—the British Empire in Kenya, the U.S. in Vietnam

and El Salvador. Drawing on archival and field research, the authors assess the degree
to which outcomes favorable to global powers in Kenya and El Salvador are correctly
attributed to those powers’ counterinsurgency strategies and the reasons for the failure
of U.S. policy in Vietnam. In this introduction, we suggest that settings where the condi-
tions for successful counterinsurgency by foreign powers are met—the existence of
allies able to gather high-quality intelligence from local people and to help build local
institutions to deliver services—are the very settings where counterinsurgency is least
“needed.”
The articles were originally presented at a workshop hosted by the Santa Fe Institute
in March 2008, which brought together historians and political scientists to critically
assess the claims made about frequently cited counterinsurgency campaigns in the
recent literature. Throughout this introduction counterinsurgency refers to the doctrine
of counterinsurgency advanced by recent advocates of the hearts-and-minds approach,
while counterinsurgency campaigns refers to campaigns carried out against insurgents
irrespective of the doctrine followed.

The Turn to Counterinsurgency

For the first year after the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military was hamstrung by former
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s insistence on low troop levels and a mecha-
nized approach to warfare. But from 2004 onward, U.S. military planners abandoned
that failing policy and its emphasis on firepower for an approach to combating insur-
gency that stressed the importance of limiting firepower to engage with civilians,
seeking to “win hearts and minds” through the increased delivery of services, particu-
larly security.1
The shift to counterinsurgency represented a reversal of a three-decade-old trend in
U.S. military doctrine. In the wake of the Vietnam War, counterinsurgency fell out of
favor in American military circles. The term counterinsurgency was redolent of the
conflicts the U.S. no longer wished to be involved in: nonconventional in form, small
in scale, peripheral to global politics, and out of favor with domestic popular opinion.
An era of counterinsurgency had, it was argued by the CIA’s former expert on the
subject, come to an end.2 While the U.S. did engage to a limited extent in counterin-
surgency in fighting some of its proxy wars in the developing world during the 1970s
and 1980s, counterinsurgency largely disappeared as a subject of debate until the end
of the cold war, with the exception of a brief reappearance during the Central Ameri-
can conflicts.3
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, American military planners reevaluated
their priorities for the post–cold war world. No longer as concerned with the threat of
global war against a rival superpower, planners and academics began to discuss “best
practice” for engaging the low-level conflicts and terrorism that were expected to
emerge in the post–cold war world.4 But despite U.S. involvement in conflicts in Somalia,
Bosnia, and elsewhere, it took the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to transform abstract

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Branch and Wood 5

discussion into a change of approach on the ground.5 More work on the subject of
counterinsurgency was produced from within the academy and military in the period
since 9/11 to date than in the previous forty years.6 But this did not force an immediate
change in the intellectual culture of the U.S. armed forces. With the assumed success
of the initial invasion of Iraq, the hi-tech, heavily mechanized conventional approach
to war appeared vindicated.
But as the Sunni insurgency strengthened, the most coherent and articulate voices
within the American military successfully argued that counterinsurgency be given an
opportunity to demonstrate its worth. Senior military supporters of a new approach to
the Iraq campaign argued that the mechanized approach to such conflicts had been
discredited in Vietnam and that alternatives had to be sought.7 American implementa-
tion of the “new” counterinsurgency against the year-old Iraqi insurgency began in the
summer of 2004.8
The new strategy ultimately aimed to imbed within the U.S. armed forces an orga-
nizational culture capable of the flexibility and restraint necessary to engage in the
slow work of gaining the trust of local allies and delivering local services. Counterin-
surgency classes based on those principles were quickly incorporated into the curriculum
at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College and in the equivalent Marine
institutions. A counterinsurgency training school was established in Iraq in 2005, where
experts trained officers and soldiers prior to deployment to the field.9 Most significantly,
a new field manual on counterinsurgency was released in late 2006.10 The practices
developed in Iraq were then exported to Afghanistan in 2009 in response to increasing
attacks by the Taliban.11

The Challenges of Counterinsurgency

Derived in part from a sustained engagement with historical and contemporary aca-
demic studies, counterinsurgency’s champions have argued that “we may be witnessing
the birth of a genuinely scientific approach to counterinsurgency.”12 But we show here
that counterinsurgency rests on principles that often prove contradictory in practice,
leading to tactics on the ground that undermine those principles.
Counterinsurgency warfare is, according to its architects, defined by highly dis-
criminatory use of violence against insurgents and the provision of a wide array of
public goods to the civilian population. Intelligence of a sufficient quality to allow
counterinsurgent forces to effectively distinguish between active insurgents and civil-
ians is thus critical to counterinsurgency. Armed with this intelligence, so the theory
goes, counterinsurgents can target violence against the insurgents and alleviate the
political, economic, and social grievances of the noninsurgent sections of the wider
population.
But the intelligence necessary to make counterinsurgency work in this way is not
readily available to counterinsurgents at the outset of a conflict. First, if sufficient inte­
lligence were available, then no counterinsurgency strategy would be necessary, as the
incipient insurgents could be easily identified and simply arrested. Second, if states

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6 Politics & Society 38(1)

were sufficiently informed or concerned about the nature of wider grievances in soci-
ety, then reforms could be implemented without need for military action.
Counterinsurgency campaigns are thus the product of both an intelligence deficit
and a political deficit, deficits that often take a particular, pernicious form. States
unwilling or unable to build up sufficient knowledge of their citizens tend to understand
their insurgent adversaries in the abstract, depicting them in collective terms—religious,
ethnic, regional, ideological, class, or national. But successful implementation of coun-
terinsurgency is dependent on viewing actors embroiled in an insurgency as individuals,
not simply as members of some identity-based collective. As the articles in this collec-
tion make clear and as advocates of counterinsurgency emphasize, the effectiveness of
counterinsurgency is dependent on the targeted delivery of violence to insurgents and
public goods to civilians. Treating individuals within a social group as insurgents by
virtue of one aspect of their collective identity is likely to create broader support for
the insurgency as individuals seek the protection of the groups they are presumed to
support.13 Indiscriminate state violence solidifies wider support for insurgents and
increases the salience of particular collective identities among the general population. As
Mark Peceny and William Stanley emphasize in their article, implementing counterinsur-
gency is particularly challenging in the aftermath of such violence. When combined with
the absence of capacity or will to provide amelioration of popular grievances, indis-
criminate state violence goes a long way to creating what David Kilcullen terms
“accidental guerrillas” out of discontented citizens.14
To overcome these intelligence and political deficits, counterinsurgents seek to col-
laborate with local allies to secure the intelligence necessary to effectively discriminate
between insurgent and noninsurgent. Such allies can take several forms, from indi-
vidual police informants in local communities, to local leaders be they elders or
warlords, to national leaders (in the case of counterinsurgency campaigns driven by
foreign actors). These allies are rarely absent as war presents actors with the opportu-
nity to further agendas that may have little to do with the conflict per se. At the local
level, the potential for social betterment, increased political power, or simply resolu-
tion of personal grievances in return for collaboration often overcomes any ideological
barriers to support for counterinsurgency. At the national level, the resources mobi-
lized for counterinsurgency prove attractive to national political leaders and
governments. But whether one is discussing an individual police informant in a colo-
nial Kenyan village or the Afghan government in the present day, the willingness of
local actors to work with counterinsurgents does not necessarily mean that they share
the goals of counterinsurgents.
Although not analyzed to any significant extent within contemporary doctrine, the
process of collaboration with local allies is thus a defining characteristic of counter-
insurgency in practice. Yet for three principal reasons, working with local allies may
undermine the implementation of counterinsurgency. First, such allies may not in fact
possess or be able to develop the intelligence necessary for the selective use of vio-
lence. Civilians in key areas may be so alienated from the counterinsurgents and their
allies—often the same government, military, or regional leaders whose repressive
practices gave rise to the insurgency, as Peceny and Stanley emphasize—that they are

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Branch and Wood 7

loath to collaborate or so fearful of insurgent retaliation that they do not trust counter-
insurgent promises of protection. Moreover, local allies may not be able to distinguish
between true and false denunciations of neighbors by neighbors, an essential capacity
if selective violence is to be effective.
Second, in the case of foreign leadership of counterinsurgency, the incorporation of
allies necessitates the devolution of some degree of control to the very domestic forces
whose practices were at best inadequate to contain the insurgency and at worse led to
its emergence, as Daniel Branch shows for the case of Kenya. With the decentraliza-
tion of control, the ability of senior commanders to reign in the excesses of their allies
is relaxed.
Third, the reliance on such local allies creates the conditions of corruption, violence
within communities, and loose command structures that characterize the three cases
discussed in this special section. Indeed, in some colonial cases, tolerance of corrup-
tion and the perpetration of atrocities by local allies appear to have been tacitly approved
as part of the package of rewards for collaboration. Devolving control to allies uncom-
mitted to the practice of counterinsurgency may thus exacerbate the grievances of
local populations confronting the everyday corruption and violence of allies, thereby
creating conditions that increase support for the insurgents. In such settings, the construc-
tion of a government seen as legitimate, which is key to the success of counterinsurgency,
is unlikely.

Counterinsurgency in Practice
Although architects of counterinsurgency argue that counterinsurgents should engage
in violence only against insurgents, in practice counterinsurgents typically engage in a
much broader range of violence. Because of the challenges outlined above, as the arti-
cles that follow demonstrate, counterinsurgency in practice can be nasty, brutish, and
long rather than the intended surgical, scientific, and efficient. One common pattern,
for example, is that military forces on the ground may revert to indiscriminate violence
in response to insurgent offensives or when the promised “success” of counterinsur-
gency is slow to materialize.
The champions of counterinsurgency doctrine pointed to the declining incidence of
civilian and American casualties in Iraq after 2004 as evidence of its effectiveness. In
2009, violence was significantly less than in 2004, and it appeared that civil war had
been averted. The decline in violence is not, however, attributable only to the shift to
counterinsurgency but also to other developments, particularly the defeat of Sunni
militias by Shia militias in Baghdad, the subsequent decision by many Sunni leaders
to collaborate with the U.S., and the decision by the Sadrist forces to stand down.15
Scholars will doubtless continue to debate whether the U.S. campaign in Iraq suc-
ceeded as events there continue to evolve, particularly in light of the reemergence of
insurgent attacks in mid-2009. In any case, by late 2008, the debate had shifted to
Afghanistan. Could the strategy deployed in Iraq “work” in the significantly different
context of Afghanistan?

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8 Politics & Society 38(1)

Collectively, the contributors to this special issue challenge the argument for the
general applicability of contemporary counterinsurgency doctrine.
Daniel Branch critically examines attempts by counterinsurgency advocates within
the U.S. armed forces to appropriate the history of British colonial counterinsurgency
wars and shows how British counterinsurgency produced a very different outcome in
Kenya than in the archetype of Malaya so celebrated by those advocates. He argues
that their frequent claim that British counterinsurgency was successful and inherently
less costly than other forms of warfare is based on that literature’s methodological
shortcomings, particularly its bias toward sources that sanitize the campaign (e.g.,
memoirs by colonial officers) and toward successful cases such as Malaya, a case
wrongly seen as typical. Using the example of the British response to the Mau Mau
rebellion in Kenya of the 1950s, Branch shows that the political, social, and economic
reforms that accompany counterinsurgency (assumed by advocates to be less punitive
as well as more effective) can bring significant suffering to civilians, particularly pop-
ulation relocation, which caused perhaps half of the deaths during the war, as well as
long-term unintended consequences, such as ongoing instability in Kenya in part because
of the economic, social, and political disenfranchisement of the Mau Mau and their
supposed allies. Defeat of the Mau Mau, he argues, was more because of the insur-
gency’s increasingly brutal tactics, which alienated the population, than the direct
effects of British policy. He reminds us as well that the counterinsurgency in Kenya
would not have been fought had the British been willing to compromise with earlier,
moderate advocates of reform.
The intellectual recovery of earlier counterinsurgency doctrine, of which the eng­
agement with colonial histories was part, was necessitated by its demise within the
American armed forces in the wake of the Vietnam War. David Hunt analyzes U.S.
strategy in Vietnam, including the reliance by both the U.S. and its South Vietnamese
allies on widespread and ill-targeted violence, particularly after 1965. Hunt docu-
ments the tensions within counterinsurgent forces between those advocating
conventional tactics, including an all-out effort to win a military victory with little
regard for the costs to civilians, and those who sought to reshape civilian loyalties
toward the state through the practice of counterinsurgency. When the latter proved too
slow or too ineffective in the eyes of advocates of the former, the tendency—even
on the part of forces such as the Australian battalions steeped in counterinsurgency
doctrine—was to revert to conventional strategies and tactics. Despite the deployment
of massive firepower by the U.S., the insurgency proved resilient, as shown in Hunt’s
discussion of local studies. And despite efforts at various times to carry out social,
political, and economic reforms, those efforts had effects not only unintended but
largely counterproductive, in part because the counterinsurgents failed to grasp the
class dimension of the insurgency. Many reforms intended to undermine local support
for the insurgents by ameliorating poverty were instead captured by local elites, inten-
sifying the class tension that fueled revolutionary mobilization. And a significant
fraction of the huge influx of aid was never delivered but lined the pockets of corrupt
officials of the southern government.

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Branch and Wood 9

Mark Peceny and William Stanley examine the case of El Salvador, a case often
hailed as a successful counterinsurgency by the U.S. In analyzing the counterinsur-
gency campaign over its duration, they show that many of the “lessons learned” by
current military planners misread the history of insurgency and counterinsurgency in El
Salvador. The Salvadoran military rarely followed the practices of counterinsurgency,
even during the period when the insurgents pursued a classic guerrilla strategy. They
argue that indiscriminate state violence deployed in the first years of the conflict radi-
cally shaped later events, including the forging of enduring political support for the
insurgents by some citizens, which reinforced a resilient insurgency that fought the
government to a stalemate. They document the challenges the U.S. confronted in
attempting to lessen this counterproductive violence, as the Salvadoran military resisted
reform to its command structure, strategy, and tactics. As in Vietnam, massive foreign
assistance brought with it massive corruption of government officials, delegitimizing
the natural ally of the U.S., the Christian Democratic Party. Political reform, particu-
larly the holding of noninclusive, wartime elections, brought unintended consequences,
including the victory of a party closely linked to right-wing death squads in the 1983
elections, a result the U.S. had to contain immediately. Rather than attributing the end
of the civil war to the successful application of the counterinsurgency doctrine, Peceny
and Stanley argue that the negotiated settlement was because of the transformation of
the interests of key actors as a result of both unintended consequences of the counterin-
surgency campaign and the (entirely exogenous) end of the cold war. They suggest that
many aspects of the Salvadoran case are typical of the conditions under which global
powers embark on counterinsurgency campaigns, particularly their reliance on weak
states with immediate past histories of violence against civilians and institutions more
experienced in repression than service delivery.

Reconsidering Counterinsurgency
The articles collected here thus draw very different lessons from the case studies com-
monly presented in support of the doctrine of counterinsurgency, demonstrating the
value of closer analysis of past campaigns. Effectively implementing the doctrine depends
on an adequate understanding of local history, culture, and politics, particularly the
social processes that sustain the insurgency. But such understanding is not likely, on
the part of neither a global power (despite the current effort to recruit anthropologists
as counterinsurgents) nor state elites, often of a distinct ethnicity, class, and way of life
from the usually rural targets of counterinsurgency policy. The implementation of
counterinsurgency thus faces particular challenges in each case, with some settings
more propitious than others. Moreover, unintended and often counterproductive effects
of counterinsurgency were frequent in the cases examined here. And the success or
failure of counterinsurgency may depend as much on exogenous events as on the
efforts of counterinsurgents. While the articles stress the specificity of the individual
case studies, they nonetheless suggest some broader arguments about the nature of
counterinsurgency warfare. Taken together, the articles reveal some profound paradoxes

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10 Politics & Society 38(1)

within counterinsurgency doctrine, paradoxes that arise from the dependency of global
counterinsurgents on local allies analyzed above.
The first paradox is between the need for strong command structures, on one hand,
and the pressure to devolve power to local allies, on the other. A unified and strong
command structure is essential to prevent the perpetration of indiscriminate (and
therefore counterproductive) violence. But such a command structure is often incom-
patible with the need to devolve some control over counterinsurgency to allies. Those
allies may provide the intelligence necessary for more discriminate state violence but
also are prone to committing acts of indiscriminate violence themselves because of
their distinct goals. Curtailing violence by an ally is particularly difficult where the ally
has carried out extensive violence and repressed advocates of civilian grievances.
Whether or not the effort to reform repressive and corrupt military allies can outpace
the lingering effects of early violence and growing corruption is central to the success
of counterinsurgency, but the outcome of that contest is not certain.
The second paradox at work is that between delivery of reform and repression. The
balance between these competing demands is continually debated among counterinsur-
gent allies, with strategy and tactics at times determined by the outcome of that internal
debate. In each case discussed here, state forces fell back on massive violence against
civilians when reform efforts to “win hearts and minds” were seen as ineffective or
slow (despite efforts to minimize force at certain times when the counterproductive
effects of state violence were evident).
Even when counterinsurgents agree on the balance between reform and repres-
sion, they have little control of how those tactics will be received on the ground,
giving rise to the third paradox, that between reform and civilian grievances. Despite
the emphasis on winning “hearts and minds”—or at least acquiescence—those engaged
in contemporary counterinsurgency commonly underestimate the memory and agency
of ordinary people, who in some settings may be pursuing a political agenda, one that
may be reinforced by even selective violence on the part of counterinsurgents, particu-
larly in the aftermath of indiscriminate violence by state forces. The delivery of
services provided by counterinsurgents but implemented by local elites seen as class
or ethnic enemies may have the unintended effect of strengthening civilian ties to
insurgents rather than the desired opposite effect. Not only are counterinsurgents and
their allies often drawn from very different social groupings than the insurgents or
wider population, the dissonance between them is likely to increase during the con-
flict. Counterinsurgent violence can intensify the bonds and heighten the salience of
ethnic or other identities, which differentiate counterinsurgents from the wider popu-
lation. The targeted delivery of reform, moreover, is most likely to benefit local allies
and thus exacerbate class and other social divisions between them and the wider popu-
lation. Finally, adequately addressing civilian grievances would often mean a degree
of reform completely unacceptable to allies. Holding allied forces responsible for
violence against civilians or for the corrupt exploitation of resources intended by
counterinsurgents for ordinary people may entail a shift of power and accountability
at dramatic odds to the agenda of allies.

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Branch and Wood 11

The fourth paradox, the paradox of legitimate insurgency, occurs when global powers
acting in pursuit of their interests find themselves in an unholy alliance against an
insurgency with broad civilian support, for example, a struggle for self-determination
or a movement to overthrow an authoritarian regime. Counterinsurgency in these
­circumstances—with its emphasis on winning civilian “hearts and minds”—results in
the dilemma of delivering services to civilians supporting the insurgency, which would
defeat the intervention’s purpose and undermine its ally, of attempting to selectively
delivery services only to government supporters, which would be difficult given the
ally’s intelligence deficit and the insurgency’s broad support, or of abandoning this
defining aspect of counterinsurgency doctrine.

Conclusion
The dilemmas that currently confront the U.S. interventions in Iraq and, particularly,
Afghanistan, reflect the challenges of counterinsurgency and the paradoxes that typi-
cally arise during attempts to implement it, as shown by the analyses of counterinsurgency
campaigns in Kenya, Vietnam, and El Salvador. As in many other cases, the interven-
tions in Iraq and Afghanistan occurred precisely under those circumstances where the
conditions for its successful application were least propitious.
In Iraq, the setting was made significantly more favorable when Shia militias defeated
their Sunni rivals in Baghdad in 2006, a development not attributable to counterinsur-
gency, which led to the strategic decision by Sunni tribes to collaborate with U.S.
forces to defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq. The U.S. then made significant progress in building
state forces more capable of selective violence, and civilians in several regions were
more forthcoming with the high-quality intelligence necessary for violence to be
selective, a case of a counterinsurgent managing well the paradox of reform and
repression. The Iraqi regime has yet, however, to address grievances central to the
insurgency and the future of Iraq, including institutionalizing a devolution of power to
Sunni and Kurdish leaders, the incorporation of militias into state forces, and the divi-
sion of oil revenues between the central and other governments. Reforms to address
these grievances would significantly undermine the Iraqi regime’s discretionary power
and resources (although it would strengthen its legitimacy), an instance of the third
paradox of reform and civilian grievances.
In Afghanistan, the U.S. and its international allies rely on a domestic government
with precisely the kind of deep intelligence and political deficits described above,
namely, one unable systematically to provide high-quality intelligence and not willing
to control rampant corruption by state officials or to hold reasonably free elections—
an illustration of the paradox of grievances and reform. In these conditions, supposedly
surgical airstrikes repeatedly cause dozens of civilian casualties, undermining the effort
to win “hearts and minds,” an illustration of the paradox of reform and repression. The
challenge of carrying out counterinsurgent tactics is, of course, particularly sharp in a
cultural setting where foreign powers are widely seen as occupying forces. The alliance
with the Pakistani government is proving treacherous as well, as deeply

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12 Politics & Society 38(1)

ingrained corruption by state officials and widespread violence against civilians by its
counterinsurgent forces—the paradox of reform and repression—undermine the selec-
tive targeting and delivery of local services central to counterinsurgency doctrine. Nor
does the Pakistani government concur with the U.S. that all insurgent forces operating in
Pakistan territory should be targeted as it believes some forces serve long-run national
interests against India.
More generally, the considerations raised in this special issue suggest that global
powers in pursuit of their national interest are likely to embark on counterinsurgency
under conditions least propitious for its success, at times against insurgencies seen by
ordinary people as legitimate, with concomitant sacrifice not only in the “blood and
treasure” of the global power but also in civilian deaths, livelihoods, and social fabrics
in the country targeted. Settings where the conditions for probable success, likely occur-
rence, and acceptable cost intersect appear to be extremely limited.
Despite the common absence of optimal conditions for counterinsurgency, champi-
ons of the strategy make bold claims for its widespread application in contexts of
irregular conflict. Variation in context can, it is claimed by counterinsurgency’s sup-
porters, be controlled for by cultural immersion by practitioners in the specific settings
in which they will fight. Counterinsurgency has then, some argue, become “armed
social science.”16 It is not by accident that anthropologists have become highly desir-
able employees within the American military in recent years.17 But given the dubious
intellectual engagement with military history highlighted through this section, it is
questionable how “scientific” this policy actually is.
Moreover, our argument raises a number of additional questions in this regard. Just
as once the prevailing threat of global war with the Soviet Union profoundly shaped
the intellectual culture of the U.S. military, what will be the broader implications for
U.S. institutions of the shift to counterinsurgency? Some changes to U.S. military
culture advocated by prominent supporters of counterinsurgency have already taken
place, for example, broadening the military’s objectives to include development and
foreign relations.18 The new and controversial Africa Command, for instance, is intended
to help create the conditions necessary for “increased political stability and economic
growth” in the sub-Saharan region.19 The efforts of counterinsurgents in a wide array
of political, social, and economic matters far from the battlefield thus raise significant
questions about the potential militarization of various branches of government, their
accountability, and the lasting impact of such changes on the quality of democracy in
the U.S., as well as the consequences for other countries. While beyond the scope of
this special section, these broader implications of this current era of counterinsurgency
need greater consideration.
Finally, and most fundamentally, under what conditions, if any, should outside actors
engage in counterinsurgency? If intervention should occur—perhaps for humanitarian
reasons—are there other effective, morally acceptable strategies whose foreseeable
and unintended consequences would cause less harm to civilian populations? Under
whose authority and under what international restrictions should such interventions
take place?

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Branch and Wood 13

Acknowledgments
This essay is the introduction to a special section of Politics & Society, “Reconsidering Coun-
terinsurgency.” The articles were initially presented at a workshop held at the Santa Fe
Institute in 2008. The authors would like to thank the Politics & Society editorial board for
their suggestions.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of
this article.

Financial Disclosure/Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

Notes
  1. Among many others, see John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Lessons from Malaya
and Vietnam (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002); and Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The
American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006). For an official statement
of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy and tactics, see U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps, U.S.
Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2007).
  2. Douglas Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance, 1950 to
the Present (New York: Free Press, 1977).
  3. D. Michael Shafer, “The Unlearned Lessons of Counterinsurgency,” Political Science
Quarterly 103, no. 1 (1988): 57–80.
  4. Stephen Hosmer, The Army’s Role in Counterinsurgency and Insurgency (Santa Monica,
CA: RAND, 1990); Steven Metz, The Future of Insurgency (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War
College, Strategic Studies Institute, 1993); Thomas Mockaitis, “A New Era of Counterin-
surgency,” RUSI Journal 136, no. 1 (1991): 73–78.
  5. William Rosenau, “Subversion and Terrorism: Understanding and Countering the Threat,”
in The Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism Annual 2006 (Oklahoma City,
OK: National Memorial for the Prevention of Terrorism), 53–54.
  6. David Kilcullen, “Counterinsurgency Redux,” undated paper available on Small Wars Jour-
nal Web site, http://smallwarsjournal.com/documents/kilcullen1.pdf (accessed September 3,
2009), 1.
  7. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, xxii.
  8. Warren Chin, “Examining the Application of British Counterinsurgency Doctrine by the
American Army in Iraq,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 18, no. 1 (2007): 1–26.
  9. Ibid., 22.
10. U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field
Manual.
11. At the time of writing (fall 2009), it is uncertain whether the Obama administration will
persevere with counterinsurgency in Afghanistan or switch to a strategy of selective tar-
geting of Taliban leaders without counterinsurgency’s emphasis on the protection of the

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14 Politics & Society 38(1)

civilian population and the delivery of local services. Whether or not a shift in strategy
occurs, advocates will continue to argue for counterinsurgency when the U.S. confronts
future conflicts.
12. Aaron Karp and Regina Karp, “Preface: Towards a Science of Counterinsurgency,” Contem-
porary Security Policy 28, no. 1 (2007): vi.
13. Stathis Kalvyas and Matthew Kocher, “How ‘Free’ is Free Riding in Civil Wars? Violence,
Insurgency, and the Collective Action Problem,” World Politics 59, no. 2 (2007): 177–216.
14. David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009).
15. Stephen Biddle, “Iraq after the Surge,” statement before the House Armed Services Com-
mittee, 110th Congress (2nd Session), January 23, 2008.
16. David Kilcullen in George Packer, “Knowing the Enemy,” The New Yorker, December 18,
2006.
17. Roberto Gonzalez, American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain
(Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009).
18. “After Smart Weapons, Smart Soldiers,” The Economist, October 27, 2007, 33–36.
19. U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), “Questions and Answers about AFRICOM,” http://
www.africom.mil/africomFAQs.asp (accessed October 5, 2009).

Bios
Daniel Branch (d.p.branch@warwick.ac.uk) is assistant professor of African history at the
University of Warwick. He is the author of Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsur-
gency, Civil War and Decolonization (2009).

Elisabeth Jean Wood (elisabeth.wood@yale.edu) is professor of political science at Yale

University and professor of the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of Insurgent Collective
Action and Civil War in El Salvador (2003) and Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent
Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador (2000).

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