Shades of CORDS in the Kush: The False Hope of Unity of Effort in American Counterinsurgency

Counterinsurgency (COIN) requires an integrated military, political, and economic program best developed by teams that field both civilians and soldiers. These units should operate with some independence but under a coherent command. In Vietnam, after several false starts, the United States developed an effective unified organization, Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), to guide the counterinsurgency. CORDS had three components absent from our efforts in Afghanistan today: sufficient personnel (particularly civilian), numerous teams, and a single chain of command that united the separate COIN programs of the disparate American departments at the district, provincial, regional, and national levels. This Paper focuses on the third issue and describes the benefits that unity of command at every level would bring to the American war in Afghanistan. The work begins with a brief introduction to counterinsurgency theory, using a population-centric model, and examines how this warfare challenges the United States. It traces the evolution of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) and the country team, describing problems at both levels. Similar efforts in Vietnam are compared, where persistent executive attention finally integrated the government’s counterinsurgency campaign under the unified command of the CORDS program. The next section attributes the American tendency towards a segregated response to cultural differences between the primary departments, executive neglect, and societal concepts of war. The Paper argues that, in its approach to COIN, the United States has forsaken the military concept of unity of command in favor of “unity of effort” expressed in multiagency literature. The final sections describe how unified authority would improve our efforts in Afghanistan and propose a model for the future.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1346/thumbnail.jp

Estudio morfosintáctico y léxico de la literatura hispanounidense. Caracterización de los fenómenos lingüísticos en Spanglish

En la bibliografía general de los estudios lingüísticos sobre la variedad híbrida del español estadounidense, conocida como Spanglish, es posible observar cómo la gran mayoría de ellos se han centrado, principalmente, en su definición (Torres Torres, 2016) y en aspectos sociolingüísticos, siempre manteniendo un desacuerdo total entre las diferentes partes. Junto a esa reflexión, hoy en día, no se dispone todavía de una gramática (Enghels, Van Belleghen y Vande Casteele, 2020) o un conjunto de textos que recoja todos los patrones lingüísticos normativizados respecto a los fenómenos léxicos y morfosintácticos de dicha modalidad. Asimismo, aunque es posible encontrar muchos estudios en lo que atañe a esta temática (Fernández-Ulloa, 2004; Hammink, 2000; Lipski, 2003, 2004, 2008; Montes-Alcalá, 2005; Otheguy, 2009) se observa que existe, de nuevo, otro desacuerdo a la hora de clasificar los diferentes procesos y subtipos lingüísticos (calcos, préstamos, cambios de código y situaciones pragmáticas de los cambios), debido a que cada lingüista propone una clasificación propia con matices diferentes y alejando la posibilidad de gramaticalizar el Spanglish. En definitiva, a partir de esas reflexiones, la presente tesis doctoral consiste en un estudio longitudinal donde se pretende recoger de un modo más amplio todos los recursos lingüísticos del Spanglish y crear una nueva clasificación para poder aplicarla a un corpus de muestras reales de un Spanglish más literario. Concretamente, se extraerán diversas muestras de diferentes décadas y áreas geográficas, principalmente de autores pertenecientes a la etiqueta del movimiento nuyorican (Tato Laviera, Miguel Piñero y Junot Díaz) o la literatura chicana (Gloria Anzaldúa, Juan Felipe Herrera, entre otros) con el fin de generalizar y probar esos recursos, usando un método comparativo y cualitativo, tanto diacrónica como diatópicamente y así intentar unificar las distintas visiones sobre este fenómeno.In the general bibliography of the linguistic studies related to the hybrid variety of the Spanish language in the United States of America, also known as Spanglish, it is possible to observe how the vast majority of them have focused mainly on its definition (Torres Torres, 2016) as well as on sociolinguistic aspects, always maintaining a total disagreement between the different parties. Along with this reflection, nowadays, Spanglish still counts with no grammar (Enghels, Van Belleghen and Vande Casteele, 2020) or a set of texts that collects all the normative linguistic patterns regarding the lexical and morphosyntactic phenomena of this modality. Besides, although it is possible to find several studies regarding this topic (Fernández-Ulloa, 2004; Hammink, 2000; Lipski, 2003, 2004, 2008; Montes-Alcalá, 2005; Otheguy, 2009) it is notable that there is a bigger disagreement when it comes to classifying the different linguistic processes and subtypes (calques, loanwords, code-switching and its pragmatic situations), due to each linguist has a certain freedom to propose its own classification with different nuances, distancing the possibility of grammaticalizing it. Thus, based on these evidences, this PhD thesis consists of a longitudinal study with the intention of collecting all the Spanglish linguistic resources, creating a new classification to be able to apply it to a corpus of real samples from some literary works in Spanglish. Specifically, various samples from different decades and geographical areas will be extracted, mainly from authors belonging to the label of the Nuyorican movement (Tato Laviera, Miguel Piñero and Junot Díaz) and the Chicano literature (Gloria Anzaldúa, Juan Felipe Herrera, among others), in order to generalise and test these resources, using a comparative and qualitative method, both diachronically and diatopically, trying to unify the different views on this linguistic and hybrid phenomenon