Rand Publishes Its Collective Wisdom on Counterinsurgency

Catching up on new pubs.

Austin Long at Rand pulls together a summary of all of RAND's work on insurgencies.

Areas of focus include government organization. Without surprise, more emphasis on co-integration of effort ("unity") and greatly expanded model of Provincial Reconstruction Teams.

Also reviewed are amnesty and reward programs, border security (external support).

Apparently, a lot this stuff is not intuitive ...

At the end, they mention census and national identity cards (something Saddam used extensively to maintain control).

I can recall, during the first months after the invasion, when the Ministries were being looted and during the days of General Garner, thinking that, with the loss of computerized registers of citizens, how elections were going to be held? Every time Rumsfeld mentioned old regime "dead-enders", I winced thinking that some early effort to quickly get a who's-who list might have provided invaluable information down the road ... anyway, there it is.