Institutionalizing Irregular Warfare Capabilities
Author: Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities Committee on Armed Services House of Representatives
Publisher:
Published: 2012-08-02
Total Pages: 108
ISBN-13: 9781478352860
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWe appreciate everybody being here for this hearing on a topic that I think will play a significant role in the security of the country moving ahead. It seems to me the basic question is to what extent we learn from our experience and build on it, and to what extent we assume that the past was just an aberration and now we can, quote, "get back to normal." I am not sure that the conventional wisdom about normal is quite right. Dr. Sebastian Gorka and David Kilcullen found that of the 464 conflicts since 1815 recorded in the Correlates of War database, 385 of them involved a nonstate actor. That is 83 percent. Dr. Bernard Fall's research, cited in the "2006 Marine Corps and SOCOM Multiservice Concept for Irregular Warfare," found there were 48 small wars in the first 65 years of the 20th century, which, taken together, involved as many people and as many casualties as either of the two World Wars. A review of U.S. military activities over the last 20 years in places like Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Colombia, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Uganda confirms this trend.