[this is the final post in this series]
Topologies of competition
In the previous post, I identified two classes of battlespace topologies: perceptual and technological. While the two classes have common dimensions, it is analytically useful to treat them as if they were separate. Social groups (and individuals) operate across a multiplicity of battlespaces (”workspaces” [...]

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[Note: I am in the process of putting together a journal article on asymmetric warfare and I will be using the next few posts to help me think abut it.]
Competition appears to be an inevitable consequence of our natural (read biological) state. Darwin termed this “natural selection”. But, as with most species, we [...]

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The personal is political
Carol Hanish (?)
I don’t usually write about politics. This isn’t because I don’t have strong political beliefs (I do) but, rather, because I prefer to devote my time and energies to other things. This wasn’t always the case, as a few of my close friends know, and I like to [...]

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The word “theory” has an interesting effect on different people. I’ve noticed that many of my undergraduate students, upon hearing the word and learning that they are sitting in a course on “theory”, start to get the same look in their eyes as deer have caught in the headlights of a car. For [...]

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so when one dispassionately and accurately speaks of cluster bombing, depleted uranium, torture at Abu Ghraib, and laying siege to civilian population centres, the response is not that it is just “rhetoric.”
Max Forte at openanthropology (NB: there is something weird with the cascading style sheets which interferes with italic script so I have changed the [...]

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In a recent blog post, Max Forte dissected the Human Terrain System’s (HTS) Top Misconceptions page. Now, in general, I have not been very kind about most of the attacks on the HTS and Max’s post is definitely an attack. It is, however, qualitatively different, in my opinion, from the majority of other [...]

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I’ve been engaged in an interesting thread on the Small Wars Council entitled Revising FM 3-24: What needs to change? While the thread is interesting in and of itself, at least if one is interested in Counter-Insurgency (COIN) doctrine, it is also interesting for another reason - the unspoken assumptions that underly both the [...]

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There is a something to be learned from looking at what a person says they are going to do and then looking at their actions. It is, in fact, one of the main reasons why all quantitative work, such as survey research, should be checked against qualitative work such as observational research (”shop-alongs” or [...]

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Yesterday (June 26, 2008), Andrew Exum posted a blog entry over at Small Wars Journal on Information Operations. As part of the post, he laid out a challenge to SWC members.
My challenge for this website’s readers, then, is the following: what do we, as counter-insurgency theorists and practitioners, mean when we use the term [...]

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The (potential) role of Anthropology operating with the military has been a topic of rather heated discussion for some time. In some cases, the reactions by Anthropologists have been close to witch hunts, while in other cases they have been quite positive. The latest foo-forah comes with the revelation that Montgomery McFate may [...]

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