Armies are invariably accused of preparing to fight the last war. Nagl examines how armies learn during the course of conflicts for which they are initially unprepared in organization, training, and mindset. He compares the development of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice in the Malayan Emergency from 1948-1960 with that developed in the Vietnam Conflict from 1950-1975, through use of archival sources and interviews with participants in both conflicts. In examining these two events, he argues that organizational culture is the key variable in determining the success or failure of attempts to adapt to changing circumstances. Differences in organizational culture is the primary reason why the British Army learned to conduct counterinsurgency in Malaya while the American Army failed to learn in Vietnam. The American Army resisted any true attempt to learn how to fight an insurgency during the course of the Vietnam Conflict, preferring to treat the war as a conventional conflict in the tradition of the Korean War or World War II. The British Army, because of its traditional role as a colonial police force and the organizational characteristics that its history and the national culture created, was better able to quickly learn and apply the lessons of counterinsurgency during the course of the Malayan Emergency. This is the first study to apply organizational learning theory to cases in which armies were engaged in actual combat.

September 11, 2001: The New Face of War? was written to help students understand the issues surrounding the September 11th terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., and to provide direction for classroom discussion. Written by Dr. Donald Snow, a national security scholar and consultant to the U.S. military, this 40 page case study provides instructors and students with a balanced, reliable, and scholarly resource about the tragedy. The first part of the booklet examines the nature and characteristic of terrorism as they have evolved and as we understood them before the September 11 attacks. In the second part, Snow looks specifically at the events surrounding the attacks, to understand better what occurred, to see how September 11 does or does not exemplify the general phenomenon of terrorism, and to assess how the attacks may have extended how we need to think about terrorism in the future.

This is the 47th volume in the Occasional Paper series of the United States Air Force Institute for National Security Studies (INSS). Among its many contributions to United States security, two noted repositories of strategic expertise within the United States Army are its foreign area officer cadre and the Department of Social Sciences faculty at the United States Military Academy. This collection of papers on Northeast Asian regional security taps the combined strength of both; its authors are four Army officers with demonstrated regional expertise, all currently or formerly assigned to West Point's Department of Social Sciences. The combined set of papers covers a broad and relevant swath of territory, both geographic and conceptual. The first paper, by Jay Parker, addresses the regional security context with special emphasis on that strategic landscape as viewed from the perspective of Japanese security and the United States' role both in Japanese security and within the broader region. Sue Bryant then fits the Korean peninsula into that regional security context, adding special emphasis on the Korean road toward unification and on the continuing U.S. military presence in Korea both for peninsular and regional security reasons. Finally, Russ Howard and Al Wilner add China to the mix and also add the third level of analysis -- their focus is on post September 11, 2001 issues and opportunities, and the specific military-to-military dimension of the United States' overall military presence and policy. Together, the papers cover the region as well as policy recommendations from macro U.S. security and military policy, to force presence, to the significant roles of individual service members.