ABSTRACT

Perspectives on the American Way of War examines salient cases of American experience in irregular warfare, focusing upon the post-World War II era.

This book asks why recent misfires have emerged in irregular warfare from an institutional, professional, and academic context which regularly produces evidence that there is in fact no lack of understanding of both irregular challenges and correct responses. Expert contributors explore the reasoning behind the inability to achieve victory, however defined, and argue that what security professionals have failed to fully recognize, even today, is that what is at issue is not warfare suffused with politics but rather the very opposite, politics suffused with warfare.

Perspectives on the American Way of War will be of great interest to scholars of war and conflict studies, strategic and military studies, insurgency and counterinsurgency, and terrorism and counterterrorism. The book was originally published as a special issue of Small Wars & Insurgencies.

chapter |13 pages

Introduction - Perspectives on the American way of war

The U.S. experience in irregular conflict

chapter 1|17 pages

The Mexican War

Frontier expansion and selective incursion

chapter 2|31 pages

Birth of the Cold War

Irregular warfare first blood in Greece

chapter 3|19 pages

Organizing for the ‘gray zone’ fight

Early Cold War realities and the CIA’s Directorate of Operations

chapter 5|39 pages

Turning gangsters into allies

The American way of war in Northern Afghanistan

chapter 7|24 pages

The American way of war in Africa

The case of Niger

chapter 8|23 pages

Too little, too late

Protecting American soft networks in COIN/CT

chapter 9|32 pages

Systems failure

The US way of irregular warfare