ABSTRACT
Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR)1 operations have gone by many other names. Small wars, low-intensity conflict, counterinsurgency, peace operations, military operations other than war – the list could be extended without difficulty, each new name representing a fresh and hopeful plateau along a learning curve that America’s armed forces have struggled to ascend. There is no question that the rhetorical instability that has surrounded what will here be styled simply “stability operations” has been symptomatic of institutional conflict and stress, a public example of which was offered a few days before the most recent revision to approved nomenclature was announced, when the United States Secretary of Defense took it upon himself, at a press conference, to admonish the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff not to call the metastasizing violence in Iraq an “insurgency,” a word that he felt gave too much credit to America’s enemies.2
