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However, the work of these outstanding scholar-practitioners has little to say about why, since 1950, the states the US supported using these methods could not survive longer than 3.5 years after US forces withdrew without a US reintervention. John Nagl, David Petraeus, James Mattis, David Kilcullen, and Andrew Krepinevich have done excellent work in describing successful population-centric COIN methods for US troops to employ while they are present. Since 1950 there has been outstanding research done on the variables at work in successful COIN. Or conversely, how do we explain how the US failed in population-centric and enemy-centric COIN in Nicaragua, but succeeded in producing a state that lasted over four decades? But how do we explain how the US was successful at population-centric and enemy-centric COIN in Vietnam but failed to produce a state that was able to survive longer than 3.5 years on average after US combat formations departed. Much of the debate regarding US COIN operations since 1950 in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan has centered around discussions of population-centric COIN or enemy-centric COIN. However, the states that resulted from US COIN interventions before 1950 have tended to last an average of ten times longer after US forces withdrew than the states that resulted from interventions after 1950, before violent overthrow or significant loss of territory. The employment of US combat formations in the COIN operations of another state is indicative of how dire US policy makers perceived the situation and their certitude that the host-nation could not defeat the insurgency and/or protect its people on its own.īefore 1950, the US intervened twice as often using combat formations in foreign counterinsurgencies as after 1950, but remained just as long. In fact, the US has only used conventional combat formations on ten occasions to assist a foreign state in defeating their own insurgencies-in nine of these cases, the US was the lead. The use of American combat formations to assist another state in killing its own rebellious citizens is an immense departure from normal international interactions between the US and states the US supports.
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Usmc insurgency series#
*This book is in the Rapid Communications in Conflict and Security (RCCS) Series (General Editor: Geoffrey R.H.