Reading the Tea Leaves: Proto-Insurgency in Honduras

(IWS/04 - Irregular Warfare Studies, book 4) This case is about an insurgency that apparently had all the essentials for success but never transitioned beyond Phase One, the proto-insurgency phase. According to Daniel Byman, the success or failure of a proto-insurgency depends in large part on the reaction of the state. This case examines a wide range of issues that worked against the Honduran governments success at extirpating the insurgency, including institutional indifference and preoccupation with external threats on the part of the Honduran Army, bureaucratic inertia on the part of the American in- country entities, and turf sensitivity by U.S. intelligence. In spite of these obstacles, the Government of Honduras (GOH) eventually neutralized the insurgent threat. The prevailing question is: How was this threat recognized?https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/ciwag-case-studies/1001/thumbnail.jp

Bandwagonistas: rhetorical re-description, strategic choice and the politics of counter-insurgency

This paper seeks to explore how a particular narrative focused on populationcentric counterinsurgency shaped American strategy during the Autumn 2009 Presidential review on Afghanistan, examine the narrative’s genealogy and suggest weaknesses and inconsistencies that exist within it. More precisely our ambition is to show how through a process of ‘rhetorical redescription’ this narrative has come to dominate contemporary American strategic discourse. We argue that in order to promote and legitimate their case, a contemporary ‘COIN Lobby’ of influential warrior scholars, academics and commentators utilizes select historical interpretations of counterinsurgency and limits discussion of COIN to what they consider to be failures in implementation. As a result, it has become very difficult for other ways of conceptualizing the counterinsurgency problem to emerge into the policy debate