Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Modern Wars - A Reply to Jones and Smith

摘要

The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 3-24), published on 15 December 2006, has attracted an extraordinary amount of attention for a doctrinal publication. A persistent criticism of the doctrine is that it fails to reflect the changing nature of modern insurgencies. This criticism has focused on the fact that many of the principles expressed in the manual are rooted in the 'classical' counterinsurgency texts authored by theorists and practitioners whose frame of reference was defined by Cold War-era wars of national liberation and the Maoist model of guerrilla warfare. According to this argument, today's insurgencies, most notably in Iraq and Afghanistan, are not like those that came before: they are, variously and at once, less hierarchical, more globalized, and more focused on the media and information domain.