{"id":4528,"date":"2011-11-21T16:17:40","date_gmt":"2011-11-21T16:17:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=4528"},"modified":"2011-11-21T16:17:40","modified_gmt":"2011-11-21T16:17:40","slug":"recommended-reading-100","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=4528","title":{"rendered":"Recommended Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

Top Billing! Mike Few<\/strong> – Blood Done Signed My\u00a0Name<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Major Mike Few<\/strong> takes leave of editorial duties at SWJ <\/strong>for a guest post at Carl Prine’s<\/strong> Line of Departure<\/a><\/strong>:<\/p>\n

….Duke professor Timothy B. Tyson’s <\/strong>Blood Done Signed My Name: A True Story<\/strong><\/em><\/a> describes the 1970 murder of Henry “Dickie” Marrow, a 23-year-old black man who once served as a paratrooper in Fort Bragg.\u00a0 The memoir them limns the acquittal of his three white killers, and what the aftermath of that injustice wrought on the tiny town of Oxford, N.C.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So, you ask, what does this have to do with small wars?\u00a0 Well, I could start by reminding you that U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis recommends that we study the works of <\/strong>Martin Luther King as if they were texts about strategy<\/strong><\/a>, and Blood Done Signed My Name <\/em>certainly is a tale about the civil rights movement.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But if we agree that Mattis is right, then don’t we have to look at how King’s strategy played out at the micro-level of villages and neighborhoods, towns like Oxford?\u00a0 And isn’t that perhaps what an entire generation of soldiers and Marines already has done overseas, albeit when prosecuting quite a different strategy to very different ends?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I was conducting recon in Iraq, I found it helpful to think of a town as an eco-system.\u00a0 Once I understood how the caste, theological, ideological, linguistic and kinship relationships entangled the village in violence, my job became the commander who tried to untie them, or the pacification process wouldn’t work.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Various types of counter-insurgency theory were important, but it was always vital to keep an independent mind about them while I explored the hard realities of life and death in these Iraqi villages.\u00a0\u00a0 Experience with violence caused me to rethink a lot of those theories, just as Blood Done Signed My Name <\/em>has made me reassess the role violence played in the larger civil rights movement<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Global Guerrillas – <\/strong>OCCUPY NOTE 11\/20\/11: The HIDDEN logic of the Occupy Movement<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

….Using John Boyd’s framework as a guide, this media disruption did have an effect across all three vectors:<\/strong><\/p>\n