This covert campaign, a combination of paramilitary operations and political reforms, was probably America's most successful counterinsurgency war.

They and a handful of other officers supervised a devastating counterinsurgency war based in part on plans devised at the Pentagon.

This whiz-bang technology, cool though it seems, is unlikely to tip the balance in the counterinsurgency war.

Instead it risks dragging the United States into a costly counterinsurgency war.

For much of that period, the military has waged a fierce counterinsurgency war against leftist guerrillas.

In one report, the team concluded that "the United States really does not know how to wage an efficient and economical counterinsurgency war."

They did a study of the major counterinsurgency wars in recent history and found a 100% correlation between successful wars and effective police forces.

It is hard to win any counterinsurgency war when the insurgents have a sanctuary of the type the Taliban has in Pakistan.

Top Pentagon officials are also seriously thinking about ways to improve the strategies for waging counterinsurgency wars.

There is a reason, the gradualists point out, that counterinsurgency wars have tended to take a decade or more.