Your company has just been warned for deployment on counterinsurgency operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. You have read David Galula, T. E. Lawrence, and Robert Thompson.  You have studied  FM 3–24 and now understand the history, philosophy, and theory of counterinsurgency. You have watched Black Hawk Down and The Battle of Algiers, and you know this will be the most difficult challenge of your life.

But what does all the theory mean, at the company level? How do the principles translate into action—at night, with the GPS down, the media criticizing you, the locals complaining in a language you don’t understand, and an unseen enemy killing your people by ones and twos? How does counterinsurgency actually happen?

– Excerpt from,  Counterinsurgency by David Kilcullen  -2010