Counterinsurgency Warfare

What Hacker News says

1. treetalkerJun 2025
   Indeed, and once you acquire this mental model you notice it everywhere. I first picked it up by reading David Galula's book Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. I commend that work to everyone who finds this topic interesting — it's a wonderful book and among the few that I keep on my shelf for periodic rereading. The central ideas are applicable far beyond warfare, and far beyond business operations too.
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2. dkimballApr 2010
   The use of the word "massacre" implies something like My Lai or the Katyn Forest, a deliberate killing of large numbers of noncombatants, especially by infantry.

   Attacks by aircraft, like those in this video (as indicated in the article) and the previous one, should be described as something else -- although it remains the case that Apaches, F/A-18s, and B-1s (the US counterpart to the Backfire) do not have the large role in COIN that the Pentagon has assigned them, and their employment in Iraq and Afghanistan reveals a poisonously cavalier attitude towards non-American lives.

   The right way to fight COIN campaigns is known (see David Galula, _Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice_ (1967)); it is not the same as the Pentagon's -- although in fairness, the US military has been trending in the right direction since the happy day when Rumsfeld was given the boot.

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