stability operations

Last year the Army released its groundbreaking field manual on stability operations, FM 3-07, a key driver in getting the service to prepare itself for a future in which it worked between the extremes of conventional offensive and defensive military action. But many of the stabilization and reconstruction tasks it envisaged — training foreign [...]

Just one thing before the Hill confirmation hearings begin. There’s a reprint of the U.S. Army’s stability operations field manual out now. Tom Ricks reads it and recontextualizes it entirely:
What we really are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think, is instability operations. I don’t think the U.S. military really has ever been comfortable with [...]

Just so no one misconstrues a previous post as me having issues with Dave Dilegge or Small Wars Journal, let me hat-tip SWJ for this just-released Army field manual about how to train for so-called “full-spectrum” operations, a fancy way of saying the Army needs to train for all contingencies. The manual, known as FM [...]

Chalk up another win for the counterinsurgents. The Washington Post reports today that one of the final acts of the Bush-era Gates Pentagon (as opposed to the Obama-era Gates Pentagon) is to elevate irregular warfare — stability operations, counterinsurgency, all that asymmetrical stuff that isn’t two mechanized armies clobbering one another — to the same [...]

A new field manual, based on lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan, seeks to move the military away from its traditional role of fighting a hostile state’s forces to stabilizing weak governments. But can the service accept a subordinate role?