On 2 May 2005, Chief of Police Major Ahmed Adiya Asaf was walk-ing along Main Street in the market area of Husaybah, a town in the Al Qaim district of northwestern Iraq, when seven men attacked, shot, and beheaded him. For the people of the Albu-Mahal tribe, the beheading of MAJ Ahmed was the last straw

This article is about the counterinsurgency experiences of two United States Special Forces Soldiers, William and Robert, and their operational detachments, which fought in al Anbar during the period from February 2004 to April 2007. It is a condensed version of several chapters of a thesis I wrote four years ago while attending the Naval Postgraduate School.

The Maoist movement in India started in the late 1950s as a peas-ant uprising in the wake of an independence struggle in Naxalbari, a small village on the Indo-Nepal border, hence the name Naxalism. The Naxalites were a group of far-left radical communists who promoted Maoist political sentiment and ideology to fight exploitation by landlords in India’s feudal postcolonial socioeconomic system. ...

After the bombing of the USSCOle in the Port of Aden on 12 October 2000, the Republic of Yemen became a potential ally of the United States in U.S. counterterrorism campaigns. To ensure the Yemeni government’s ability to combat terrorism on its own soil and prevent such attacks from occurring again, the United States provided the Yemeni Special Forces with light equipment and engaged in a series of joint exercises with them.

This interview is taken from the collection of the Combating Terrorism Archive Project. LTC Mike Richardson spoke on 25 February 2013 with MAJ Nils French, an Engineer officer in the Canadian Army, about some of his experiences while deployed in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, throughout most of 2009.

The field grade officers I teach often ask how they can set and maintain ethical command climates in their specialized small units, especially when they are operating far from the flagpole, and for long periods of time. Leaders can find this aspect of command difficult even when they have eyes on their people daily and maintain good contact with “higher”...

If you’re thinking about joining the Central f*&%#!@g Intelligence Agency as a f*&%#!@g analyst, to make big f*&%#!@g things happen, take a few tips from the motion picture Zero Dark Thirty. If stomping your feet and making pouty faces doesn’t get you what you want, threaten your boss with a congressional investigation—a sure route to promotion...

Military historian Max Boot started and ended his presentation at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School by showing a widescreen image of the cover of his book, Invisible Armies. The cover reproduces a colorful painting by the most famous painter of the Greek Revolution, Theodoros Vryzakis (1814–1878), titled “The Destruction of Dramali at Dervenakia"...