The Strategic Use of Force in Counterinsurgency

The Strategic Use of Force in Counterinsurgency: Find, Fix, Fight focuses on how to understand the relationship between the use of force and the outcomes of such use. Specifically, there is debate as to how to evaluate counterinsurgency conflicts, and what prescriptions flow from that evaluation. The Neo-Classicist school emphasises prescriptions which are either directly from, or inspired by, Cold War counterinsurgency efforts undertaken by anti-communist states. The Revisionist school focuses on how best to evaluate the political dimensions of such conflicts. This book finds that a third approach, Reflective-Action, is best as it combines Neo-Classicism’s strength of issuing practical prescriptions with Revisionism’s strength for conceptually evaluating counterinsurgency conflicts. This conceptual debate is exposited in three cases. They are the British counterinsurgency during the Malayan Emergency of the 1940s and 1950s, American counterinsurgency in South Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s, and the Coalition counterinsurgency in Iraq during the 2000s.