CORDS and the Whole of Government Approach: Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Beyond

From the February 2010 Small Wars Journal

February 4, 2010
by Richard Weitz

All too often, the U.S. national security sys-tem has proven unable to integrate its diplomatic, military, economic, and other elements of national power adequately. The weak integration, due pri-marily to poor interagency cooperation, has pre-sented particular problems for the United States when waging counterinsurgencies. The new U.S. counterinsurgency field manual, FM 3-24, points out that ?military efforts are necessary and impor-tant to counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts, but they are only effective when integrated into a compre-hensive strategy employing all instruments of na-tional power.?1 To read the rest of the article please click here

Richard Weitz is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Political-Military Analysis at Hudson Institute.

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