Understanding Counterinsurgency: Doctrine, Operations and Challenges

This textbook offers an accessible introduction to counterinsurgency operations, a key aspect of modern warfare.

Feature essays by some of the world's leading experts on unconventional conflict, both scholars and practitioners, the book discusses how modern regular armed forces react, and should react, to irregular warfare. The volume is divided into three main sections:

-Doctrinal origins: analyzing the intellectual and historical roots of modern Western theory and practice;

-Operational aspects: examining the specific role of various military services in counterinsurgency, but also special forces, intelligence, and local security forces

-Challenges: looking at wider issues, such as governance, culture, ethics, civil-military cooperation, information operations, and time.

Understanding Counterinsurgency is the first comprehensive textbook on counterinsurgency, and will be essential reading for all students of small wars, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, strategic studies, and security studies, in both graduate and undergraduate courses, as well as in professional military schools.

Thomas Rid is a visiting scholar at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, and a non-resident fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations in the School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.

Thomas Keaney, Colonel USAF (Retd), is associate director of strategic studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.