"Victory in war starts in training" is an aphorism that rings true for every military, and even nonmilitary, organization.1 Routine training events, in the form of SOF Joint Combined Exchange Trainings (JCETs), have taken place in the Philippines for more than two decades as part of the resolute US response to global terrorism. Among other goals, the primary intent of the Special Operations Command, Pacific (SOCPAC) JCET is to provide Philippine security forces with the ability and competencies to thwart terrorist acts and to deny terrorists both sanctuary and training grounds for their activities in the Southeast Pacific region. After many millions of US dollars have been spent, however, has this program been effective?...

A terrorist organization, like any other organization, must struggle to secure adequate financial resources if it is to survive and continue its primary activity: carrying out acts of violence. As terrorism finance expert Michael Freeman notes, if terrorist groups do not have enough money, their violence will have to come to an end. Martha Crenshaw, a noted scholar of terrorism studies, points out that the ability to act is vital for terrorist groups' survival: "Acts of terrorism may be motivated by the imperative of organizational survival...

The Lord's Resistance Army/Movement (LRA/M or simply LRA), founded in the late 1980s, is a Ugandan insurgent group that operated primarily out of the northern and eastern part of Uganda until 2006. After 2006, under pressure from counterinsurgency operations, the group relocated to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and eventually moved into the Central African Republic (CAR) via the Republic of South Sudan. Based on reports of its activities, the LRA is also suspected to be present in Sudan and southeastern Chad...

Do not fight the war that fits your organization and weapon, but choose your way of fighting, then build your system. Since the current Ukrainian crisis began in February 2014, "hybrid warfare" has become a hot topic once again. The term was coined and gained traction in military strategic thinking after Hezbollah's success against Israel in the Second Lebanon War in 2006. In preparation for that conflict, Hezbollah constructed artfully concealed fortified positions, tunnel systems, underground medical centers, and large caches of pre-positioned weapons and ammunitions. Because the war had no direct effect on European nations or the United States...

Do not fight the war that fits your organization and weapon, but choose your way of fighting, then build your system. Since the current Ukrainian crisis began in February 2014, "hybrid warfare" has become a hot topic once again. The term was coined and gained traction in military strategic thinking after Hezbollah's success against Israel in the Second Lebanon War in 2006. In preparation for that conflict, Hezbollah constructed artfully concealed fortified positions, tunnel systems, underground medical centers, and large caches of pre-positioned weapons and ammunitions. Because the war had no direct effect on European nations or the United States...

This interview is taken from the collection of the Combating Terrorism Archive Project (CTAP).1 On 22 January 2015, Dr. Doug Borer sat down with Dr. Michael Noonan of the Foreign Policy Research Institute to talk about Noonan's experiences as a member of a military transition team in Iraq's Tal Afar district and his career as a scholar in the field of counterterrorism...

I'm always amazed and a little disheartened when someone in a military or law enforcement organization whom I know and respect looks me in the eye and says, "I'm a tool," and yet I hear that self-assessment often. If offered in public, the comment is typically followed by snickers from the listeners. That's because in current American slang, the word "tool" refers to someone who is incapable of self-reflection—a factotum who possesses all the capacity for intellectual self-analysis of a pair of pliers...

As a young boy growing up in the conflict-prone region of East and Central Africa, in 1979 my family and I had to flee civil war in our country, Uganda, to seek refuge in the Sudan. We then had to flee back to Uganda in 1987 because of yet another civil war. Idean Salehyan's book, Rebels without Borders: Transnational Insurgencies in World Politics, which grew out of his doctoral dissertation, thus comes as a validation of my personal observation that most civil wars have at least some element of interstate conflict...

The American-led campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq led to an outpouring of thought and debate on the subject of irregular warfare. The most recent American military counterinsurgency doctrine, Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies (FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33), definitively characterized such struggles as being asymmetric in nature, and insurgents as operating most often from a position of weakness...