These books provide incisive analyses of two fundamental challenges faced by the United States in its “war on terror” response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The first concerns the need to relearn principles of counterinsurgency applied in Vietnam, and the second concerns the need to navigate the challenges that arise from intelligence sharing, the post-9/11 necessity of which is widely accepted but the costs of which are potentially high.

The New Counterinsurgency Era is an articulate and thoughtful appeal for institutional acceptance of the continued centrality of counterinsurgency to the U.S. military. As David Ucko makes clear, counterinsurgency and stabilization operations are complex multilevel endeavors. They aim to deliver stabilization as the first stage of a state-building process and involve the deployment of ground forces in the midst of local civilian populations in what are, to varying degrees, essentially nonpermissive operational environments. The adversary remains elusive; the loyalty of the local population, into which the adversary dissolves, cannot be fully relied upon, even as infrastructure is developed for its benefit; language barriers militate against the easy overcoming of suspicion; and local security partners are weak and can exhibit divided loyalties. For these very reasons, such operations have not been the U.S. military's preferred form of deployment, and the lessons learned from confronting this type of challenge in Vietnam were subsequently “unlearned.” Indeed, the overriding lesson that the U.S. military took from Vietnam was to avoid future Vietnams. Counterinsurgency remained, in a formal sense, marginal to U.S. military thinking. Ucko provides a clear analysis of why this continued to be the case, considering interventions in the 1980s and 1990s, the impact of MOOTWs (military operations other than war), the so-called revolution in military affairs, and, from 2001, the Bush/Rumsfeld approach to defense and place of stabilization/peacekeeping within U.S. military thinking.

As a consequence, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in 2001 made no provision for stabilization operations, despite Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's recognition that “we don't want Afghanistan a year from now to go back to being a place that harbors terrorists, so it is in our interest to be attentive to what kind of government comes along” (p. 56). Similarly, there was no role for stabilization or counterinsurgency doctrine in planning for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Hence, the U.S. military was unprepared for the guerrilla war that followed (despite CIA warnings as to the possibility), which Rumsfeld initially attributed to a few “dead-enders.”

There have now been a number of accounts of this unpreparedness and the gradual response—relearning and applying the lessons that arose from the experience of Vietnam—but one of the key strengths of Ucko's book lies in the detail with which he maps out the evolution and nature of that response (what he terms “innovation under fire”) and provides a clear account of its intellectual drivers. While the U.S. military increasingly addressed the question of counterinsurgency during 2004–5, it did so in an inconsistent manner that treated the requirement as a temporary aberration. However, in 2005 a counterinsurgency community began to emerge that was based around figures like H. R. McMaster and David Petraeus. As a consequence of its growing influence, by the time the 2006 “Quadrennial Defense Review” was published, counterinsurgency was occupying a central place in the military's vision of armed forces as “proficient in irregular operations, including counterinsurgency and stabilization operations, as they are today in high-intensity combat…. They will understand foreign cultures and societies and possess the ability to train, mentor and advise foreign security forces and conduct counterinsurgency campaigns” (p. 83).

Ucko's key argument, however, is that even though the post-2005 emphasis on counterinsurgency delivered results on the ground in Iraq, extended the influence of Petraeus and the counterinsurgency community, and achieved some degree of institutionalization of counterinsurgency thinking within the Department of Defense, this community still faced entrenched opposition. Debate continued as to how much focus should be devoted to counterinsurgency in an institution that remained “firmly anchored to conventional priorities and programs” (p. 166)—especially in light of a belief that there must be “no more Iraqs.” For Ucko: “Ultimately the many achievements of the COIN [counterinsurgency] community and a shift to counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq were, much like previous developments, events conducted on the sidelines of an institution unwilling or unable to displace its established priorities” (p. 167).

Hence, the point of Ucko's book is to warn against the risk of unlearning the lessons of Iraq, thus leaving the U.S. military unprepared for future Iraqs. However, for others the lesson of Iraq is that in the future, the United States should avoid small wars of choice and so obviate an institutional emphasis on counterinsurgency. The implicit question here is the kind of future wars in which the United States is most likely to be engaged. The author's view is clear. He cites the military historian Michael Howard's warning: “The military may protest that this is not the kind of war that they joined up to fight, and taxpayers that they see little return for their money. [Yet] this is the only war we are likely to get: it is also the only kind of peace. So let us have no illusions about it” (p. 176). However, the history of institutional learning within the U.S. military with regard to counterinsurgency suggests that Ucko may well be disappointed. Nevertheless, his clearly argued and perceptive book will itself inform the ongoing debate and so may yet shape it.

The post-9/11 challenges that the United States and its allies have faced in collecting their own human intelligence on Al Qaeda and its affiliates have generated considerable debate about intelligence sharing. The potential benefits of this are clear, but the potential pitfalls are numerous and serious—the case of “Curveball,” the Iraqi defector debriefed by the German Intelligence Service (BND—the Bundesnachrichtendienst), whose false claims about Iraq's biological weapons program fed into the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq, illustrates these well. As the existing literature on intelligence sharing makes clear, issues of trust are central.

In his tightly argued book, James Igoe Walsh builds on this basic insight to categorize the barriers to effective intelligence sharing as being twofold. Firstly, there is a bargaining problem. Potential partners must negotiate around the kinds of intelligence that each will collect, how it will be shared, and how the costs will be met. Secondly, there is the enforcement problem. This arises from the risk of what Walsh terms “defection”—that is, where states renege on their promises to share intelligence. Defection can take various forms and involve altering, fabricating, or withholding intelligence. The risk is heightened in the case of states with weak central structures where intelligence services enjoy high degrees of autonomy—a situation not unheard of in the context of the war on terror.

The purpose of The International Politics of Intelligence Sharing is to propose a solution based on an application of the principles of relational contracting, a branch of transaction cost economics. As Walsh explains, the key insight is “that firms do not simply exist to produce goods and services but also to manage the relations among their members by creating hierarchical relationships in which owners and managers exercise considerable direct control over their subordinates” (p. 15). Applied to intelligence sharing, this means that the potentially high transaction costs that bargaining and enforcement represent can be managed to ensure that they do not derail otherwise mutually advantageous cooperation. However, the solution relies on intelligence-sharing partners accepting the existence of a hierarchy, of dominant and subordinate parties, and accepting that the dominant party “is responsible for making the major decisions, and the subordinate party or parties recognize the authority of the dominant party and are responsible for complying with these decisions” (p. 17). Walsh argues that the contract that forms the basis of the hierarchy would give the dominant state the right to interpret the agreement, the right to establish oversight mechanisms to ensure subordinate state compliance, and the right to punish defection by subordinate states.

In terms of international relations and intelligence theory, this is an interesting, distinctive, and bold proposal, and it deserves to be debated at length and in comparable detail to that provided by Walsh. Considerations of space mean that I can only begin to do this briefly. One obvious response to the proposal is that it is incredibly invasive. As Walsh outlines: “[T]he dominant country's intelligence services might require their counterparts to hand over some of the raw information on which they base their conclusions so that its accuracy can be evaluated [or] the dominant state may insist on directly managing the other country's intelligence service, supervising the activities of their counterpart's collection activities, and vetting the sources and employees of their partner's services. The dominant state may assign its personnel to policymaking or operational tasks in the subordinate state's agencies” (p. 20). The realist assumptions that tend to underpin investment in intelligence the world over would militate against any such open-ended contractual (in a theoretical sense) arrangements, which are more likely to be limited to specific circumstances and even then require considerable incentivization.

This also begs the question of what is in it for subordinate states. Walsh accepts that creating hierarchies is expensive for the dominant state (p. 128), but his case study of hierarchical sharing with Morocco, Jordan, and Egypt might have explored this question more fully. While his proposal would clearly lessen the risk of defection or cheating that dominant states confront, it is not clear that it offers similar reassurance to subordinate states. Why should they trust the dominant state? Hence, trust is not removed as an issue; it is simply displaced. Finally, when the relationship is underpinned by a form of contract that takes us beyond common interest and mutual trust, I am not sure that “intelligence sharing” is any longer the most appropriate term. Sharing is essentially voluntary; contractually derived liaison is not.

In sum, then, both of these clearly argued books make a substantial contribution to post-9/11 security debates. Developments on the ground in Iraq will inform assessments of the success of the counterinsurgency campaign there over the medium term, but for the reasons outlined by Michael Howard, Ucko's central argument has an importance that goes beyond current campaigns. For his part, Walsh has produced an innovative and fascinating book that advances the debate over intelligence sharing. It deserves to be widely debated and should become a reference point in future discussion of the issue.