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Much of the history written about the Vietnam War overlooks the U.S. Marine Corps Combined Action Platoons. These CAPs lived in the Vietnamese villages, with the difficult and dangerous mission of defending the villages from both the National Liberation Front guerrillas and the soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army. The CAPs also worked to improve living conditions by helping the people with projects, such as building schools, bridges, and irrigation systems for their fields. In War in the Villages, Ted Easterling examines how well the CAPs performed as a counterinsurgency method, how the Marines adjusted to life in the Vietnamese villages, and how they worked to accomplish their mission. The CAPs generally performed their counterinsurgency role well, but they were hampered by factors beyond their control. Most important was the conflict between the Army and the Marine Corps over an appropriate strategy for the Vietnam War, along with weakness of the government of the Republic of South Vietnam and the strategic and the tactical ability of the North Vietnamese Army. War in the Villages helps to explain how and why this potential was realized and squandered. Marines who served in the CAPs served honorably in difficult circumstances. Most of these Marines believed they were helping the people of South Vietnam, and they served superbly. The failure to end the war more favorably was no fault of theirs.

The Strategic Use of Force in Counterinsurgency: Find, Fix, Fight focuses on how to understand the relationship between the use of force and the outcomes of such use. Specifically, there is debate as to how to evaluate counterinsurgency conflicts, and what prescriptions flow from that evaluation. The Neo-Classicist school emphasises prescriptions which are either directly from, or inspired by, Cold War counterinsurgency efforts undertaken by anti-communist states. The Revisionist school focuses on how best to evaluate the political dimensions of such conflicts. This book finds that a third approach, Reflective-Action, is best as it combines Neo-Classicism's strength of issuing practical prescriptions with Revisionism's strength for conceptually evaluating counterinsurgency conflicts. This conceptual debate is exposited in three cases. They are the British counterinsurgency during the Malayan Emergency of the 1940s and 1950s, American counterinsurgency in South Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s, and the Coalition counterinsurgency in Iraq during the 2000s.

A searing indictment of US strategy in Afghanistan from a distinguished military leader and West Point military historian—“A remarkable book” (National Review). In 2008, Col. Gian Gentile exposed a growing rift among military intellectuals with an article titled “Misreading the Surge Threatens U.S. Army's Conventional Capabilities,” that appeared in World Politics Review. While the years of US strategy in Afghanistan had been dominated by the doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN), Gentile and a small group of dissident officers and defense analysts began to question the necessity and efficacy of COIN—essentially armed nation-building—in achieving the United States'limited core policy objective in Afghanistan: the destruction of Al Qaeda. Drawing both on the author's experiences as a combat battalion commander in the Iraq War and his research into the application of counterinsurgency in a variety of historical contexts, Wrong Turn is a brilliant summation of Gentile's views of the failures of COIN, as well as a trenchant reevaluation of US operations in Afghanistan. “Gentile is convinced that Obama's ‘surge'in Afghanistan can't work.... And, if Afghanistan doesn't turn around soon, the Democrats... who have come to embrace the Petraeus-Nagl view of modern warfare... may find themselves wondering whether it's time to go back to the drawing board.” —The New Republic