Winning The War By Winning The Peace

With little doubt, three of the most pressing and frequent problems grappled with in Western defense and geostrategic literature over the past 20-30 years have been how to fight asymmetric wars, how to win the hearts and minds of an enemy populace, and how to terminate wars and devise exit strategies successfully. None of these problems is new in the history of warfare, of course, but they have achieved particular saliency in the United States because of Korea, Vietnam, and the first Gulf war. After that war, with an unrepentant Saddam Hussein still on the scene making threatening gestures, fourth and fifth problems¿how to counter weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and how to conduct urban combat¿came to the fore in the literature. Most recently, with the terrorist destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and our continuing wars of reprisal against the Taliban in Afghanistan and against al Qaeda in that country...