Over at the esteemable Small Wars Journal, I sit down with lauded author Peter Godwin for a discussion on the counter-insurgency lessons-learned from the Rhodesian Bush War. Godwin was a patrolman with the British South Africa Police during the war, and later –as a war correspondent– played a key role in exposing Robert Mugabe’s brutal Matabeleland massacre.
His books, Mukiwa and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, are some of the finest narratives on southern Africa war and politics that I’ve read. Mukiwa, in particular, lays out simple COIN principles so effectively it should be mandatory reading prior to an Afghanistan or Iraq deployment. Head over to Small Wars Journal to read and discuss.
–John Noonan
From the COIN Vault: An Interview with Peter Godwin
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Awesome stuff. I just read through it myself and there was much to learn. On a side note, Eeben Barlow (Executive Outcomes, has wrote a three part series about counter-insurgency. He talks about COIN from a military point of view, and from a private military point of view. Which to me is extremely fascinating. He classifies EO’s operations in Angola as ‘COIN/Mobile Warfare’. If you are a student of warfare, and of COIN, I highly suggest going over to his blog and checking it out. Cheers.
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Part 3 of the Series
http://eebenbarlowsmilitaryandsecurityblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/random-thoughts-on-countering.html
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Eeben Barlow
From Wikipedia
Lt-Col. Eeben Barlow is a former member of the apartheid-era South African Defence Force and was the second-in-command of its elite special forces 32 Battalion Reconnaissance Wing. He later served in Military Intelligence as an agent handler and later as an operative and region commander in the ultra-secret Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), a covert division of Special Forces. He founded the private military contractor (PMC) Executive Outcomes (EO) in 1989, and was involved in providing counter-insurgency as well as peacekeeping forces to mainly under-developed
Listening to COIN experts is like listening to a surgeon who has killed all his previous patients but assures you that