This is a good little post on a subject you don’t hear much about, yet is pretty important to today’s ranchers and farmers along the border with Mexico, or to farmers who are caught in the middle of conflicts throughout the world.  If you look at farms and ranches as a strategic asset of […]

The RAND study found:
• Modern insurgencies last approximately 10 years and the government’s chances of winning increase slightly over time.
• Withdrawal of state sponsorship cripples an insurgency and typically leads to its defeat, while inconsistent or impartial support to either side generally presages defeat.
• Pseudo-democracies do not often succeed against insurgencies and are rarely successful in fully democratizing. 
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    The attacks “are not about armed confrontation. They are about subversion of the government,” said Terrence K. Kelly, a senior researcher at the Washington-based RAND Corporation who has studied how rebuilding efforts work in war zones. America’s strategy counts on development work to increase the legitimacy and reach of the Karzai government. With these […]

Furthermore, the introduction of sophisticated weapons (e.g., ATGMs, MANPADS) could radically escalate the challenges faced by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, as it did for the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
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That quote up top is the one part I really clued in on, and I have talked about this […]

   Boy, this is a long one and this will take you a little bit to read through all the speeches and various articles.  But hey, if you are a student of strategy and are wanting to take a look into the future of defense contracting, you have to figure out what the big boys […]

     It strikes me that the significance of Mitchell, Arnold, Schreiver, and Boyd and their travails was not that they were always right. What strikes me is that they had the vision and insight to see that the world and technology had changed.  They understood the implications of that change, and they pressed ahead in […]

Rule 1: “Many and Small” Beats “Few and Large.”
Rule 2: Finding Matters More Than Flanking.
Rule 3: Swarming Is the New Surging.
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This was an awesome interview, and if you want, you can watch this in five parts or in one viewing. If you are overseas and bandwidth is a problem, the first […]

   I love papers like this, because these are the kind of deals that ruffle the feathers of Tankers and Armor fans, as well as status quo military thinkers. Thanks to Small Wars Journal for publishing it. Basically, William has presented some excellent low cost hybrid warfare concepts that should be of great interest to the […]

     For traditional defense companies, the operative word is “non-kinetic,” another speaker asserted.
“We love our kinetic weapons, and we don’t want to let them go,” he said. “But the world is moving in a different direction.”
     Here’s the problem: Kinetic weapons only are useful in phases two, three and four of war. Gates […]

   Just a heads up, John was one of Rumsfeld’s advisors. lol  But he does bring up some good points to think about, and I wanted to put them out there for the FJ readership to analyze. Here is a quick run down of the rules the author came up with:
   Rule 1: “Many and Small” Beats “Few […]