A Shot in the Dark: A History of the U.S. Army Asymmetric Warfare Group

by Paul J. Cook

2024 · Vernon Press

This book presents the U.S. Army Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG) as an example of successful change by the Army in wartime. It argues that creating the AWG required senior leaders to create a vision differing from the Army’s self-conceptualization, change bureaucratic processes to turn the vision into an actual unit, and then place the new unit in the hands of uniquely qualified leaders to build and sustain it. In doing this, it considers the forces influencing change within the Army and argues the two most significant are its self-conceptualization and institutional bureaucracy. The work explores three major subject areas that provide historical context. The first is the Army’s institutional history from the early 1950s through 2001. This period begins with the Army seeking to validate its place in America’s national security strategy and ends with the Army trying to chart a path into the post-Cold War future. The Army’s history is largely one of asymmetric warfare. The work thus examines several campaigns that offered lessons for subsequent wars. Some lessons the Army took to heart, others it ignored. As the AWG was a direct outgrowth of the failures and frustrations the Army experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq, the book examines these campaigns and identifies the specific problems that led senior Army leaders to create the AWG. Finally, the work chronicles the AWG’s creation in 2006, growth, and re-assignment from the Army staff to a fully-fledged organization subordinate to the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command in 2011 to its deactivation. This action resulted not from the unit’s failure to adapt to a post-insurgency Army focusing on modernization. Rather, it resulted from the Army failing to realize that while the AWG was a product of counterinsurgency, it provided the capability to support the Army during a period of great strategic and institutional uncertainty.

The role of federal military forces in domestic disorders, 1945-1992

by Paul J. Scheips

2005 · Government Printing Office

NOTE: NO FURTHER DISCOUNT FOR THIS PRINT PRODUCT--OVERSTOCK SALE --Significantly reduced list price while supplies lastCenter of Military History Publication 30 20 1. Army Historical Series.3rd of three volumes by the Center of Military History on the role of federal military forces in domestic disturbances. This volume covers the institutional and other changes that took place during the early postwar years and carries the reader through the civil rights revolution, the disturbances that accompanied the Vietnam War, and the controversies surrounding the Army's intervention in the race riot in Los Angeles in 1992, which occurred after this volume was essentially completed, and with an extensive bibliography containing a note on various sources used.