Looks kinda like they don’t know why it was taken down. My guess is that someone somewhere demanded a review after the first WaPo article on the FM.

I downloaded the FM, and, being impatient, skipped right to the back to find out how it ends. Appendix C is an interesting distillations of lessons, many of which I suspect Vietnam vets will find familiar. For me the classic line was:

23. Practice armed civil affairs. Counterinsurgency is armed social work, an attempt to redress basic social and political problems while being shot at. This makes civil affairs a central counterinsurgency activity, not an afterthought.

If only Donald Rumsfeld had been able to read this manual …

My mother, who lives in a swing state and voted for Obama, just asked me how she can switch her party affiliation from republican to democrat.

My brother and I are both dems, but she’s been on the darkside for as long as I can remember.

She recently retired and got cable and only watches MSNBC.

Hardball is going to cover the rightwing and the rise in gun violence, in a few minutes

Edit

In case anyone else was wondering what a Joint High Speed Vessel might be, it’s a big honkin’ catamaran
_____

I’ll take a two seater with a stick shift.

On another note, if you want some light reading, ““Tactics in Counterinsurgency” is back online. It’s a “big honkin’” file, but here it is:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fmi3-24-2.pdf

Secrecy News has the story on why it was taken down in the first place.

http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2009/04/tactics_coin.html

In case anyone else was wondering what a Joint High Speed Vessel might be, it’s a big honkin’ catamaran that’s supposed to be able to offload quickly in ports of underdeveloped countries. If we’re going to continue the kinds of campaigns we’ve been involved in lately, there’s a definite need for such vessels.

Too bad, his recommendations sound sensible to me.