This book examines the long, complex experience of American involvement in irregular warfare. It begins with the American Revolution in 1776 and chronicles big and small irregular wars for the next two and a half centuries. What is readily apparent in dirty wars is that failure is painfully tangible while success is often amorphous. Successfully fighting these wars often entails striking a critical balance between military victory and politics. America's status as a democracy only serves to make fighting - and, to a greater degree, winning - these irregular wars even harder. Rather than futilely insisting that Americans should not or cannot fight this kind of irregular war, Russell Crandall argues that we would be better served by considering how we can do so as cleanly and effectively as possible.

America's Dirty Wars: Irregular Warfare from 1776 to the War on Terror

In examining the area surrounding Columbus, New Mexico, and Palomas, Chihuahua, as a landscape of violence, this dissertation historicizes the process by which violent actions create a sense of place. Although neither town is considered large enough to be of much consequence, both were targeted by bellicose campaigns that sought to destabilize the Mexican state during the Porfiriato and the Mexican Revolution. Raids on the Palomas customs house were, at least in part, responses to the drive of the Mexican government under Porfirio Díaz to create modern progress and order in Mexico. For many inhabitants of rural northwestern Chihuahua, the imposition of capitalist modes of land and resource ownership, delineation, and exchange deprived them of access to a livelihood. The dissertation, therefore, considers as violence the reallocation of resources under the modern capitalist notion of law and order. By employing a broad definition of violence, seemingly disparate actions, such as land surveys and insurgencies, are juxtaposed in order to highlight the connections between them.

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Columbus, New Mexico, and Palomas, Chihuahua: Transnational Landscapes of Violence, 1888-1930

Preamble In this article we show how the twentieth-century appearance of a Chicano minority population in the United States originated from the subordination of the nation of Mexico to U.S. economic and political interests. We argue that, far from being marginal to the course of modern U.S. history, the Chicano minority, an immigrant people, stands at the center both of that history and of a process of imperial expansionism that originated in the last three decades of the nineteenth century and that continues today.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/phr.2002.71.1.19

Empire and the Origins of Twentieth-Century Migration from Mexico to the United States

: This monograph establishes criteria for targeting enemy leadership during decapitation operations. It analyzes United States operations targeting strategic individuals over the course of the Twentieth Century. This discussion creates a list of recommended standards for the military commander to consider while planning decapitation operations. Five US decapitation operations conducted over a ninety-two year span provided historical precedence to answer the above questions. These strategic individuals were chosen for this study because they represent a century of US activity targeting enemy leadership. The author developed criteria for targeting enemy leadership through a combination of the Defense Department's doctrinal targeting process, the generally recognized principles of Just War Theory, Robert A. Pape's Decapitation Theory, and the conclusions derived from Chapter Three's case studies. This monograph concludes that attempting to decapitate an organization without adhering to the following criteria will severely hobble the operation's probability of strategic success. The four Decapitation Criteria are: Criticality, Legitimacy, Cost Effectiveness, and Proportionality. Decapitation, most often, shapes the effectiveness of a larger, grand strategy that incorporates all elements of national power. The author recommends that commanders should always investigate the potential strategic values of targeting enemy leadership. More often than not, the pressure applied will provide some level of benefit. However, commanders must continuously reassess the expected value derived from decapitation and weigh that value against its costs. Employing Decapitation Criteria and the subsequent Outcome Analysis developed in this monograph can effectively aid a commander deciding on the benefits of targeting enemy leadership, and increase the operation's strategic productivity.

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Clarence Clemens. Clendenen

Papers

The United States And Pancho Villa: A Study In Unconventional Diplomacy