Armed Forces & Society

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This article introduces the Symposium on the Afghanistan War. During and after the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, emotions ran high. This special issue responds to public calls for further in-depth study of the Afghanistan War. We assembled an ...

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This commentary examines the influence of the Afghanistan war on the content of Armed Forces & Society. My 20-year tenure as editor of Armed Forces & Society overlaps completely with the war. Using the lenses of the postmodern or post-Cold War military, I ...

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This article explores shortcomings in military effectiveness in the war in Afghanistan. It focuses on three sets of problems: the failure to resolve internal contradictions in the training effort, the failure to integrate political considerations with ...

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On October 7, 2001, 3 weeks after 9/11, U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan; bombers struck Taliban headquarters and Al Qaeda training sites. By early December, the Taliban and Al Qaeda have been defeated and had fled. However, a war that began so ...

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Why did Afghanistan falter as a U.S. partner? America’s war in Afghanistan was lost for many reasons, but the U.S. military contributed to its downfall in two ways. First, U.S. combat units, trained to fight conventional battles, conducted ...

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The United States government’s inability to view the conflict with the Taliban through the lens of the bargaining model of war was a fundamental element of its failure in Afghanistan. This problem was reinforced by a dysfunctional civil–military relations ...

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Numerous reflections exist regarding who should be held accountable and what lessons should be learned from the military withdrawal and political collapse of Afghanistan. This essay argues that the failures in Afghanistan are second- and third-order ...

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The American war in Afghanistan was originally an act of retaliation and retribution. Over time it assumed the moral burden of state-building. The state-building effort however was undermined by inadequate planning, inadequate knowledge, and inadequate ...

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The Western defeat in Afghanistan was due to an inadequate process of strategic reflection informed, first, by an overestimation of the attractiveness of the Western political agenda to Afghans and, second, by overconfidence in the effectiveness of its ...

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What role did North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the coalition (International Security Assistance Force—ISAF) it led play in the failure of the West in Afghanistan? This essay argues that the ISAF intelligence community’s inability to come to ...

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This essay reflects on the broad contours of the war in Afghanistan from Southeast Asia’s perspective. While the United States’ withdrawal from Kabul was calamitous, the pessimism about America’s role in Southeast Asia has been overstated. The United ...

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The two decades of war in Afghanistan left a mark on the American armed forces and redefined the American ways of war-making. One of this war’s legacies is the reimagining of the role of private military and security contractors in contemporary warfare. ...

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The evolution of the status of American women as warriors between Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm in 1990-1991 and the War in Afghanistan, beginning in 2001 [and simultaneously the Iraq War in 2003] is explored. This era of American civil-military ...

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Can the presence of international organizations reduce civilian deaths caused by aerial bombing? This commentary examines this question in the specific context of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. We evaluate this based on interviews conducted with members ...