The current crisis in Iraq no doubt lends a certain urgency to the revised U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual. In an age of “failed states,” “asymmetrical warfare,” and new forms of networking and war making, the U.S. Army is hardly alone in wanting to better understand the sources of rebellion and the requisites of stable political order. Yet if the manual is a timely document, it is also continuous with a long and venerable political science tradition. From Machiavelli's The Prince to Antonio Gramsci's “The Modern Prince,” from Lenin's The State and Revolution to Samuel P. Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies, writers seeking a “science of politics” have argued not simply about how to understand the dynamics of rebellion and the mechanisms of state power but about the desirability of different ways of mobilizing and channeling rebellion and of incorporating it within stable political structures. “Counterinsurgency” is thus both a topic of theorizing and a form of praxis, whether its practitioners be the Red Army in postrevolutionary Russia or the U.S. Army in Guatemala, Vietnam, or contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq. The revised manual thus presents an excellent occasion to reflect on current events and on broader theoretical issues.

The contributors to this symposium were selected because each, in a different way, has thought seriously and written about questions of insurgency and counterinsurgency broadly understood. They were asked to comment on the manual, the context in which it appears, and its basic political analyses and prescriptions. They were also asked to reflect more generally on the manual as an exercise in “applied political science,” considering the ways it draws from and makes use of current political science theories and the value positions that lie behind its analyses. In occasioning these questions, the manual can serve not simply as an object of political science commentary but also as a mirror through which to view our profession and the value of the knowledge it produces.