Book Reviews

145

America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. By

Christopher Lawrence. Oxford: Casemate Publishers, 2015. £19.99. ISBN: 978-1612002781.

In America’s Modern Wars historian and analyst Christopher Lawrence offers a system-
atic and very detailed analysis of the correlates of success in counterinsurgency based on
data gathered in his capacity as executive director of The Dupuy Institute (TDI), a non-
profit organization dedicated to scholarly research and analysis of historical data related
to armed conflict. An impressive amount of data is included in this book. It is, in fact,
rooted in a number of TDI reports compiled for several military institutions. The intro-
duction and first chapter introduce the reader to the origins and findings of TDI’s Iraq
Casualty Estimate. The second chapter provides an outline of the most important theo-
retical works on insurgency and counterinsurgency. Fourteen chapters are subsequently
dedicated to the analysis of quantitative data derived from up to 83 conflicts that occurred
since the end of the Second World War in order to empirically identify correlates of suc-
cess and failure. Chapters 17 and 18 test the findings against the principles distilled by
major theorists of revolutionary warfare and counterinsurgency. Chapter 19 is a quantita-
tive analysis of withdrawal from external military interventions. Chapters 20 and 21
focus on the force ratio model developed in America’s recent wars. Finally, chapters 22
to 24 summarize findings and explore avenues for future research.
The book identifies a certain number of key variables upon which to base analysis:
indigenous and intervening government typologies, insurgency motivations, insurgency
structures, a counterinsurgency typology, rules of engagement, and the outcome of con-
flict. These are subsequently employed to critically examine the Vietnam, Iraq, and
Afghanistan wars and determine the various elements and factors supporting the ultimate
outcome of each conflict.
Unfortunately, America’s Modern Wars has considerable problems related to terminol-
ogy and concepts, operationalization of variables, and the general organization of the book.
With regard to terminology, the book is rather unclear. The author fails to problematize basic
concepts such as insurgency and counterinsurgency. Conceptual turmoil is not new to this
field of inquiry and in recent years there has been considerable debate with regard to what
can be defined as an insurgency and what amounts to counterinsurgency.1 The book’s dis-
cussion of basic terms and concepts seems to betray scarce familiarity with these debates, as
it provides rather outdated definitions of both. Insurgency is not discussed and defined in
relation to the broader category of internal conflict or civil war, to which a considerable
number of scholars now relate it.2 Similarly, it is not clear whether counterinsurgency is used
to refer to a specific population-centric operational approach or, in a more general sense, to
any set of measures employed in order to suppress insurgency.3
There are some problems also with regard to variable operationalization. It is often hard
for the reader to grasp how the book does so with the variables it identifies in the first chap-
ters. Chapter 5, for instance, deals with the cause of insurgency, but conflates the cause of
conflict with its political message (presumably the political message of the major insurgent
groups). There is substantial agreement today among scholars over the fact that the original
causes of an insurgency, those motivating so-called ‘first-movers’, might not be (and often
are not) the same that motivate ‘late joiners’. Second, the cause (or causes) of an insurgency
cannot be conflated with the political message under which insurgent groups discursively
articulate their armed challenge against the current holder of central power.4 Semantical
146 War in History 25(1)

confusion apart, the author does not explain how he went on to establish whether an insur-
gency is (in his typology) limited, central, or overarching. This is the case with many other
variables identified by the book, as for example the ‘structure’ of insurgencies.
Concerning the third point, the structure of the book would have benefited from
sharper editing and substantial reorganization. The lack of an overarching structure guid-
ing the reader from one chapter to another hardly makes it user-friendly. This is perhaps
ascribable to the fact that the book is the result of several different studies and reports. It
does, however, seriously undermine its practical and scholarly utility. The findings it
generates, especially related to force ratios and boots on the ground, are far from being
unimportant, but inferences are scattered throughout the book and they were framed
within a narrow perspective. As a consequence, it is not fully clear how, cumulatively,
the book’s findings might help in understanding Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan or, even
more importantly, what the book’s findings have to say about the understanding of coun-
terinsurgency prevailing in Western armies, as embodied in FM3-24 as well as recent
French, British, and NATO counterinsurgency doctrines.
To sum up, America’s Modern Wars can be considered a useful source of data for
analysts and scholars but, overall, it does not add much to scholarly and professional
debates that have taken place in recent years over Western interventions in foreign civil
wars. As such, it could have some value for the community of professional defence and
military analysts, but would probably be of limited interest and value for the broader
academic public.

Niccolò Petrelli
Roma Tre University, Italy

Notes
1. David H. Ucko, ‘Critics gone wild: Counterinsurgency as the root of all evil’, Small Wars &
Insurgencies, 25/1 (2014), pp. 161–79; Beatrice Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy (Oxford),
pp. 419–37.
2. Stathis Kalyvas, ‘The Changing Character of Civil Wars, 1800–2009’, in Hew Strachan and
Sybille Scheipers, eds, The Changing Character of War (Oxford, 2011), pp. 203, 216.
3. David Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency (New York, 2010), p. 2.
4. See Stathis Kalyvas, ‘The Ontology of “Political Violence”: Action and Identity in Civil
Wars’, Perspectives on Politics 1/3 (2003), pp. 476, 486; Nicholas Sambanis, ‘Using Case
Studies to Expand Economic Models of Civil War’, p. 263; see also Isabelle Duyvesteyn,
‘Contemporary War: Ethnic Conflict, Resource Conflict or Something Else?’ Civil Wars 3/1
(2000), pp. 92–116.