Here’s something that may be of interest to readers at KoW – a great website I’ve somehow managed to miss: New Books in History is hosted by Marshall Poe and features his interviews with authors about their work. Right now, I’m listening to Azar Gat talking about one of my favourite recent reads, his War in Human Civilization.

This great site is another example of the changing face of academic output. Blogging, podcasting, and even vodcasting are becoming more widespread and accepted forms of scholarly activity. And that’s all to the good.

I’m off on my travels in a week or so. Who should go in the backpack with Alfred Lansing and Raymond Chandler? I’m taking a bit of psychology, natch: George Marcus and friends on emotion and political judgment, for some work I’m doing. That leaves me at least one book light, and without any strategy or military history. What’s it going to be? It was almost this, but not quite.

Going where the sun keeps shining

We revisited an old chestnut this week, during a KCL colleague’s fascinating seminar on Kenya during the Mau Mau revolt: what’s the point of using theory in an essentially historical account?

In an interdisciplinary department, this is always good for a laugh. I was heavily outnumbered by historians, who, you’d think, would have learned by now that that they have to apply concepts in order to avoid being ad hoc storytellers. Apparently not. I tactfully pointed out that they were suffering from groupthink, but to no avail.

Don’t get me wrong, too often you see spurious theorising jammed in ahead of some more-or-less detached primary material – very often that’s true of work converted from the PhD. Nonetheless, I don’t think you need to see history as social science rather than as a humanities subject in order to conceive of it as a theoretical exercise, rather than an old-fashioned trawl through the archive material, presented in engaging prose style. Aside from beach reading, we left narrative history behind some time ago – even in military history. Indeed,  Clausewitz gave a good kick up the behind of atheoretical military historians some years ago, even if it thereafter took some time for the message to sink in.

Anyway, I picked up Bruce Berman’s book on Control and Crisis in Kenya, recommended by Huw Bennett in the seminar. Here’s what a man who includes the dread word ‘Dialectic’ in his subtitle has to say on the matter:

The historical evidence with which we have to work consists largely of the unavoidably subjective records or observations of human experience, whether in official or private archives, the accounts of journalists or travellers, interviews with surviving participants or traditional oral accounts. And such evidence, as any scholar who has worked with it well knows, is almost always incomplete, if not fragmentary, and often maddeningly inconclusive or contradictory.  Pattern, process or structure in history do not emerge from the evidence through a process of inductive inference. The facts, as sociologists of science have repeatedly demonstrated in recent years, do not speak for themselves, but only through more or less explicit theoretical concepts and assumptions that guide their selection, suggest their relationships and render them meaningful. This intellectual apparatus must be supplied by the analyst, as explicitly as possible, before the collections and evaluation of the evidence begins. Otherwise our ability to develop a reflexive, self-awareness of the conceptual and methodological bases of historical analysis and critically evaluate the results of employing one or another theoretical approach are seriously compromised.

Quite so. Those who disavow explicit theorising in their research are nonetheless engaged in theorising – they just don’t want to admit it. I consider that a gauntlet dispatched to the feet of my historical friends, and look forward to their thoughts.

Apologies for the slow-posting on KOW lately. For myself the excuse is that I’ve been concentrating on a paper which needs to be finished asap. But two blog-tactic stories caught my eye this morning that I’d like to share. The first is the amazing Mr Gary Brooks Faulkner,

An American construction worker has been detained in the mountains of Pakistan after authorities there found him carrying a sword, pistol and night-vision goggles on a solo mission to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden.

Not pleased with the efforts since 911 of the United States and its allies to capture Bin Laden Faulker, 50 years old, suffering from kidney disease requiring regular dialysis, struck out on his own. Now most people will think he is crazy. His brother insists,

“He’s as normal as you and I,” Scott Faulkner said. “He’s just very passionate, and, as a Christian, he felt, when Osama mocked this country after 9/11, and it didn’t feel like the military was doing enough, it became his passion, his mission, to track down Osama, and kill him, or bring him back alive.”  

Personally, I think he’s a throwback to an earlier age when people were just, I don’t know, tougher, more intrepid, more bad ass– like the real-life figures in Peter Hopkirk’s great books. Respect.

On the other hand we have this story from the Daily Mail Spot the Difference about some as yet unknown person airbrushing the cigar from an iconic photo of Winston Churchill which is now rather embarrassingly hanging over the front entrance of the Britain at War Experience in Southeast London.

Of course this air-brushing of history reeks of Stalinism (see this brilliant book The Commissar Vanishes: Falsification of Photographs and Art in the Soviet Union). But the really depressing is how typical this is of 21st century vigilantism. Whatever you may conclude of Gary Faulkner’s mental state as he set out on his one-man war on terror you’ve got to admire the fact that he put his neck on the line (literally, in the area he was patrolling a Polish engineer was decapitated by Pakistani Taliban last year). That’s old school. In the second instance some unknown busybody vandalizes history in the pursuit of their own private war on smoking. Pathetic.

Who's next?

Who produced the greatest strategists of all time, dead and alive? America or Europe?

Before wading into that minefield, we need some criteria, some points of orientation. The key should be a body of strategic theory, writings of general nature. Just making history or writing about it doesn’t count here. That excludes two sets of people who might otherwise be considered strategists or military writers: great military historians — like Hans Delbrück or Douglas Porch — and exceptionally gifted commanders, such as Napoleon or perhaps Petraeus.

First the old strategists of Europe. Most would go by one name only: Clausewitz, Jomini, Ardant du Picq, Hubert Lyautey, Joseph-Simon Gallieni, Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, Frank Kitson, Basil Liddell Hart, Robert Thompson, C.E. Callwell, Roger Trinquier, André Beaufre, David Galula, T.E. Lawrence, Giulio Douhet, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, Helmuth von Moltke, Engels, Lenin — to be fair in this little contest, we should not include those thinkers who predate the United States, such as Thucydides or Machiavelli.

Contrast this with America’s greatest classic writers of strategy: Alfred Thayer Mahan, Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, Bernard Brodie, and Samuel Huntington. (I hesitate to count John Boyd; he really didn’t write enough.)

Certainly I missed great men, and perhaps a woman? But historically, it seems, Europe churned out far more strategic thinkers than anybody else. Well, in a way that’s what you would expect from a continent that has produced both the enlightenment and literary achievements of breathtaking scope — and more wars and more bloodshed than any other patch of earth on the planet. An interesting note: given that France lost most of the time, they’re doing pretty well in terms of strategists. Compare that to Russia or Italy.

You think this is a Euro-centric view? It is. The West’s intellectual, economic, and military dominance made it a bit difficult for non-Western strategic writers: they’re either very old, such as Sun Tsu, or former insurgents, like Mao, Marighella, or Che Guevara. (The jihadists’ outstanding writer, Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, is really not that impressive. A dumb ideology is unlikely to produce brilliance.) For the time being, we’re still waiting for China and India to come forward with great thinkers, not just tall buildings and cheap cars.

So how about living strategists? Given that America eclipsed Europe in terms of geostrategic weight some time in the first half of the 20th century, and given that the United States attracts the best brains in all fields, you would expect strategic tomes adorned with stars and stripes all over the place. But no.

Among the great living military thinkers in the United States are Peter Paret (born in Berlin and partly raised in France), Edward Luttwak (with Romanian, Italian, and English roots), Eliot Cohen, and of course perhaps the most impressive, Thomas Schelling.

Europe — or rather the UK — has Sir Lawrence Freedman, Sir Michael Howard, Hew Strachan, Colin Gray, and a few on the continent, among them Gérard Chaliand in France and perhaps Herfried Münkler in Germany. If we liberally count in Israel, there’s at least Martin van Creveld and Shimon Naveh to add to the list.

Again, the list is certainly not comprehensive, and perhaps it tilts too much into history. But whatever the metric, Europe is doing pretty well, then and now. Although it clearly seems we’re past our prime. The same cannot be said about the United States, which is probably still near the height of its power. For that, the strategic record is surprisingly thin. One thing to note is that — if I’m not mistaken — there are only two American goyim among the strategy heavy-hitters, either dead or alive, Alfred Thayer Mahan (a commander also known for crashing ships into stationary objects) and Thomas Schelling (who since veered off into economics). Better do something. Importing promising new strategists from Australia, of all places, is a good start.

But on a more serious note, this brief comparison raises a more pressing question. Why the dearth of strategic writing in recent years? A veritable strategy book should have a half-life of more than a few years, or even decades. Describing events in a historic or journalistic fashion doesn’t do the trick. Merely crunching numbers and explaining some dependent variable also won’t cut it. The academy’s incentives, it seems, are bad for strategy. But strategic thought really should be more interesting that just history or political science: after all it is the art of shaping realities — yours and your enemy’s — not just describing and explaining them, constructivist or whatever.

It may be a little odd to post something so extensive on a presentation that I did not even attend, but since the US Army War College has been charitable enough to share the material from its 21^st Strategy Conference on YouTube, I was able to catch Dr Jeremy Black’s contribution to this event, which I found highly stimulating, for a number of reasons.

You can view the full presentation here (H/T Weichong Ong), but as a recap (and to allow me to comment somewhat), these were some of the points that stuck with me:

‘we ought to be cognisant of the fact that the majority of the world’s population are not involved in wars with us, that the majority of the wars in the world don’t involve us and that we don’t define, in our experience, warfare’

This has to do with the data points and experiences we use to define and think about war. Two aspects of this strike me as quite staggering; both relate to what I might term ‘strategic solipsism’:

First – the persistence with which war is understood, in the Western world, as occurring on an isolated battlefield and ending, decisively, when one force is militarily defeated. Statistically, this heuristic notion is clearly an anomaly, and historically, it may be nothing more than a grossly simplified recollection of some of those wars that disproportionately shape our understanding of the term (primarily the Second World War). Clearly, the recent re-emergence of ‘irregular warfare’ or of ‘wars among the people’ have helped to challenge this conception somewhat, but this is also an understanding of war that is firmly entrenched and one that I believe still exerts a powerful influence on our worldview.

Second – the stubbornness with which we seek to export our historically questionable and statistically insignificant understanding of war on the rest of the world. Jeremy Black comments on this in his presentation, noting that ‘one of the difficulties is that our entire analysis of military affairs is predicated on the view of a kind of paradigm power diffusion, in other words, we set the standards and the other peoples are supposed to, in some way, conform’. As Black further notes, this may in fact be ‘an absurdity’.

A second memorable part of the presentation deals with the unprecedented global economic growth in the last 60-70 years, which Black posits as a bulwark against the inherently destabilising effects of the simultaneous processes of democratisation and growing populism. Black goes on to argue that if we can’t replicate this economic growth, there are going to be larger numbers of unmet expectations and grievances worldwide, grievances that tend to be interpreted on the basis of historicised distinctions, often along the lines of ethnicity, regionalism or religion (though he also proposes the comeback of ‘class’ as a growing factor in explaining political violence).

This reminded me of E. H. Carr’s excellent Twenty Years’ Crisis, about the 1919-1939 period of course, a time he described as marked by:

the abrupt descent from the visionary hopes of the first decade to the grim despair of the second, from a utopia which took little account of the reality to a reality from which every element of utopia was rigorously excluded.

Will we face a similar crisis in the coming century? Carr presented his twenty years’ crisis as resulting from the breakdown of an international order whose relevance had long lapsed, and the failure of Western powers to adapt to the conditions of the new inter-war era. The problem, really, was the stubborn conviction in many Western capitals of a ‘harmony of interest’ among nations, in toothless legalism and the irrationality of war given the recent and very destructive experience of World War I.

These tendencies appear eminently repeatable. Indeed, it is quite conceivable that our enduring strategic solipsism and lack of  enforcement mechanisms for the order that we seek to champion (be it through NATO or even the US military, following Iraq and Afghanistan) may, particularly against the backdrop of growing economic and political instability, bring about a very similar crisis in the century to come.

For a large part of the Second World War, the RAF sought to break the morale of the German civilian population through area bombing. They failed, of course – it took an invasion and a lack of fuel to beat the Germans. But why didn’t the population crack? Why did German production continue to increase until extremely late in the war, and why was there no widespread uprising against the Nazis? A related question: why do well drilled, disciplined troops sometimes fall apart under pressure, while the civilian populations of large cities subjected to intense bombardment did not?

Of course, Arthur Harris thought that the problem was not enough bombing – the RAF lacked capacity much before 1944, and thereafter got diverted into bombing oil and communications targets – what Harris called ‘panacea targets’. He later conceded that morale bombing didn’t work, but that heavy area bombing would have done the job anyway, regardless of the effect on civilian morale:

the policy of destroying industrial cities, and the factories in them, was not merely the only possible one for Bomber Command at that time; it was also the best way of destroying Germany’s capacity to produce war material. The morale of the enemy under bombing could be taken as an imponderable factor. Just possibly a break in morale might lead to the collapse of the enemy, and more probably bad morale would add to the loss of production resulting directly from air raid damage, but it was not necessary to take these possibilities into account.

That’s post-hoc justification for you. At the time, Bomber Command was going after enemy morale, alright. It was directed in 1941 to prioritize ‘destroying the morale of the civil population as a whole and of the industrial workers in particular’. Then, in 1942, another directive reiterated that ‘The primary object of your preparations should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population, and in particular on the industrial workers.’ And in 1945, a memo from the PM arrived, somewhat late in the day: ‘It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed’. All those, incidentally, are drawn from AC Grayling’s fascinating book, Among the Dead Cities.

Solly Zuckerman, in his British Bombing Survey Unit report, and later in his autobiography makes a convincing case that morale attacks didn’t work. This from the BBSU:

That the German civilian had to endure increasingly severe hardships during the last two years of the war is […] plain. On the other hand, there is no indication that his morale reached breaking-point as a result of air attacks. The hardships to which the German population were put were borne stoically in the face of what must have been a growing realisation, from the beginning of 1944 onwards that short of a miracle, Germany was bound to lose the war.

Why so stoical? As ever, I see plenty of scope for psychology to shed some light on the complex reasons for group and individual behaviour. The British army places considerable emphasis on ‘shock action’. Shocking enemy troops can be much more effective than killing them – ask a Frenchman about the German breakthrough at Sedan in 1940. In fact, ask Marc Bloch:

Men are made so that they will face expected dangers in expected places a good deal more easily than the sudden appearance of deadly peril from behind a turn in the road which they have been led to suppose is perfectly safe. Years ago, shortly after the battle of the Marne, I saw men who the day before had gone into the line under murderous fire without turning a hair run like rabbits just because three shells fell quite harmlessly on a road where they had piled arms in order to furnish a water fatigue.

If you shock troops, perhaps through surprise and manoeuvre, and then give them space to flee, they might just oblige. But flight isn’t inevitable under acute stress. Fighting is an option too, of course, though shock inhibits that, as, when it comes to civilians, does capability. The other option is to soak up the punishment in a condition of stressed apathy. Martin Seligman showed in a famous series of experiments in the 1960s that you could induce apathy in dogs – and, in some respects, that’s what the RAF’s campaign seems to have done. Robert Pape, in his classic analysis, writes:

punishment does not work. Modern nation states have extremely high pain thresholds when important interests are at stake, which conventional munitions cannot overcome. Low to moderate levels of punishment inspire more anger than fear, heavy bombardment produces apathy, not rebellion.

The other factor here is social – many ‘truths’ are social valid – we tend, a few iconoclasts aside, to adopt the attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of whatever referent groups are salient at the time. Although many Germans were not fanatical Nazis, and although their options for resistance were limited by an oppressive surveillance society, their inclination to resist might not have been great either – resistance wasn’t socially acceptable (a very few independently minded folk aside). As a comparator, Britain wasn’t an oppressive totalitarian society, and yet here too people didn’t collectively panic under aerial bombardment in the manner predicted by Guilio Douhet. Coercion is an important factor in shaping behaviour, in other words – but I think it can be over-emphasised in this case.

On the other hand, the social cues we take from our peers can be extremely influential in determining behaviour – and can lend themselves neatly to business as usual. The various studies are the stuff of my dinner party patter: there’s the Kitty Genevese murder, the classic Sherif autokinetic experiments, or the equally classic Asch line judgment experiment. Normally, at that point, the other guests tell me to lighten up. In short though, people carefully observe how others around them are behaving, and do their darnedest to fit in: on average, it’s a good survival technique. If everyone affects a studied nonchalance, in other words, there’s a chance of collectively enduring heavy bombing.

Of course, some Germans did panic under bombing. They fled the cities and the stupefying death and destruction. But they returned to work and live as best they could, time and again. German society continued to function, soldiers were clothed, fighter jets manufactured, food distribution continued. Until, in the end, invading armies and a lack of fuel brought the regime crashing down.

Jonathan D. Caverley has quite an interesting piece on Vietnam and what it really says about counterinsurgency in the latest issue of International Security. Consider this another sequel to Andrew Krepinevich’s study, The Army and Vietnam. Krepinevich made the argument that ‘Big Army’ was unable and unwilling to adapt to the operational realities of counterinsurgency and therefore persisted with the ‘Army Concept’ – conventional warfare – even when the situation on the ground called for something else. If you pardon this sequel analogy, the second instalment is typified by Dale Andrade’s ‘Westmoreland Was Right‘, published in Small Wars & Insurgencies, in which he argued that, because of the coexistence of an insurgent and a conventional threat, it was reasonable, even justified, for Westmoreland to concentrate on the latter at the expense of the former.

Both of these texts are relevant to today’s campaigns, because, in Krepinevich’s case, it shows institutional intransigence vis-à-vis COIN and, in Andrade’s case, the difficulties of drawing lessons from history without due attention to specific historical context. Caverley’s piece is a sequel in the sense that it adds a third interpretation of what happened in Vietnam, and of what it means for today’s wars.

His thesis is that Vietnam was fought conventionally rather than through COIN because such was the preference of the U.S. electorate, which would rather send hardware (capital) than men (labour). Keenly aware of this preference, President Johnson acquiesced, even though doing so compromised U.S. objectives in Vietnam.

The article, entitled ‘The Myth of Military Myopia Democracy, Small Wars, and Vietnam’ is old-school academic: it oozes primary sources (or just sources in general), successfully locates itself within the existing literature, throws in some statistics for good measure (if you haven’t already, read Abu M’s recent post ‘Quantitative Analysis Manifesto’), uses models, and has a clearly defined sample space (democracies vice autocracies). In terms of historical analysis, Caverley convincingly shows how Johnson and McNamara persisted with a strictly ‘conventional’ approach all while seemingly aware that it would fail to counter the insurgency. In his own words, Caverley ‘offers a theory of how a rational actor, the average voter in a democracy, can favor what appears to be a nonstrategic policy’.

It is an interesting read, one that leans heavily on economic theory (rational-actor voter; ‘capital’- versus ‘labour’-driven wars; ‘cost internalisation’ etc.).  Also, the historical research should offer something to those well versed with the Vietnam War. For example, Caverley cites Westmoreland as stating to his Pentagon colleagues that the U.S. military was fighting the war too conventionally, that ‘Vietnam is no place for either tank or mechanized infantry units’. Similarly, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Harold Johnson is quoted as saying that ‘The presence of tank formations tends to create a psychological atmosphere of conventional combat’. To Caverley the generals’ understanding of operational requirements was dismissed by an administration more concerned with appeasing an electorate instinctively resistant to the deployment of additional troops to Vietnam. In a similar vein:

Contradicting both McNamara’s recommendations and the claims of the military myopia argument, Westmoreland proposed a new concept of operations in August 1966 that devoted “a significant number of the U.S./Free World Maneuver Battalions” to pacification missions, which “encompass base security and at the same time support revolutionary development by spreading security radially from the bases to protect more of the population. Saturation patrolling, civic action, and close association with ARVN, regional and popular forces to bolster their combat effectiveness are among the tasks of the ground force elements.

This, certainly, is another interesting addition to the overly crude dichotomy of Westmoreland as the Vietnam baddie and Abrams as the saviour of U.S. strategy (until the rug was swept away from under his feet). As the same time, how significant are these quotations? Another general to whom history has not been so kind, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, recommended in an August 2003 interview that rather than mount repeated raids, U.S. troops ought to adopt a ‘cordon and knock’ procedure by which they would ‘seek permission to enter accompanied by an Iraqi representative, instead of breaking down the door’. He also correctly assessed that U.S. heavy-handedness had ‘in this culture [created] some Iraqis that then had to act because of their value systems against us in terms of revenge, possibly because there were casualties on their side and also because of the impact on their dignity and respect’. People really do say all sorts of things.

For me perhaps the most interesting reason to read this article was for its broader implications. Caverley makes the voter’s interest the prime determinant of military strategy, as the ‘government assesses military doctrine in light of public preferences over outcomes… and the costs in blood and treasure’. Because the electorate favours capital-driven (machines) rather than labour-driven (soldiers) wars, the government is in a self-imposed straitjacket, leading to bad strategy being consciously implemented. Even more bleakly, whereas the Krepinevich perspective could plausibly envisage an organisation doing better, learning, adapting, Caverley concludes that ‘short of reducing the average voter’s influence, a democracy is unlikely to “learn” to conduct effective COIN’. So we’re all doomed.

For example, Caverley concludes, ‘fixating on reforming the armed services (or even the civilian tools of foreign policy) in an effort to improve democratic performance in small wars is its own form of myopia’, as ‘if a rational, fully informed electorate views [an unsuccessful] military doctrine as its best option, the prospects for change are’ minimal. From this, Caverley draws the obvious conclusion: ‘the distribution of costs and benefits affects not only how a state should fight a small war, but whether it enters such conflicts in the first place’.

Certainly food for thought, but it bears noting that there are some pretty questionable aspects to the argumentation here. First, how new is this apparently revolutionary finding? Clausewitz himself wrote of ‘triniterian wars’, encompassing that special relationship between the government, the military and the people. That the people in a democracy limit the alternatives available to the government is the way it has always been; in fact, isn’t it the way it is supposed to be?

But more importantly, the article is at times in danger of getting lost in its own assumptions and in its use of Vietnam as its one case-study. For example, if a government can coolly calculate public support when designing its COIN strategy (or lack thereof) why would it intervene in the first place? Consider the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Can we seriously contend that the Bush administration consciously screwed up the ‘post-conflict’ phase because he was scared of losing votes? Wouldn’t a more ‘labour-‘ as opposed to ‘capital-based’ approach to the ensuing insurgency have served him better politically? Certainly, despite adhering strictly to a ‘capital’-dominated way of fighting, the Republican lost heavily in the 2006 Congressional elections, primarily because of the mismanagement of the war in Iraq… How does this square with Caverley’s argument?

Second, assuming voter preferences militate against proper COIN, how do we explain changes in strategy toward COIN, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and in previous campaigns too? What public rhetoric, what change in voter preference, determines the change? In fact, most COIN campaigns are marked by an initially botched effort. It is historically typical. We can ascribe that trend to profit-calculating politicians counting the vote deficit of conducting proper COIN or to institutions that are ill-configured for and unfamiliar with the complex challenge of political violence. Take your pick…

Finally, and most damningly, how can the Johnson’s administration’s war in Vietnam, which cost the U.S. a combined total of almost 36,000 lives be seen as as ‘capital’-driven, or as concerned with losing machines rather than men?

I suspect my main problem with the article is that it uses the economic theory of the ‘rational actor’ to understand not only voter preferences but also the selection of how exactly to prosecute a war. Even presenting the latter as a matter of ‘choosing’ one strategy among many is to reduce the complexity of war-fighting to a caricaturesque degree. The article is too theory-driven and too clever, but in the sense that it will provoke and maybe challenge established wisdom on Vietnam, it is worth reading. In another sense, it is simply a very sophisticated and perhaps overly academic explanation for why ‘muddling through’ is such a popular recourse in COIN.

1. The Quiet American (1958, Joseph Mankiewicz)
2. Spartacus (1960, Stanley Kubrick)
3. Lawrence of Arabia (1962, David Lean)
4. La 317ème Section (1965, Pierre Schoendoerffer)
5. La battaglia di Algeri (1966, Gillo Pontecorvo)
6. Lost Command (1966, Mark Robson)
7. Army of Shadows (1969, Jean-Pierre Melville)
8. Cromwell (1970, Ken Hughes)
9. Soldier of Orange (1977, Paul Verhoeven)
10. Breaker Morant (1980, Bruce Beresford)
11. L’honneur d’un capitaine (1982, Pierre Schoendoerffer)
12. Full Metal Jacket (1987, Stanley Kubrick)
13. Michael Collins (1996, Neil Jordan)
14. No Man’s Land (2001, Danis Tanović)
15. Bloody Sunday (2002, Paul Greengrass) [updated]
16. L’ennemi intime (2007, Florent Emilio Siri)
17. Che (2008, Steven Soderbergh)
    
18. Waltz with Bashir (2008, Ari Folman)
19. Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (2008, Uli Edel, Bernd Eichinger)
20. The Hurt Locker (2009, Kathryn Bigelow) [updated]

(Note: this is not a comprehensive selection of films, and I’m sure we missed great movies — feel free to point that out in the comments.)

[Update: we took Defiance off the list and added The Hurt Locker.]

Some trailers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXCwR2JE8rE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xBcwhq_zXA

So many things about this short film, ‘Malaya Patrol’, are just classic, from the tea-drinking in the 90 degree jungle, to the 1950s’ stern narration of ‘bandits’ and ‘red terrorists’. Still the mention of ’15 month tours in the jungle’ should give pause. All in all, things sure have changed…