Forecasting Insurgency: Common Denominators as Tripwires for Future Conflict

Abstract

America maintains arguably the greatest military capacity of any nation in the world. Yet this military might has proven unable to anticipate or defeat the insurgent conflicts that constitute the country’s longest and most costly wars. This portfolio identifies and tests a set of ‘tripwires’ for identifying nascent insurgencies. It then prescribes an analytic framework to more rapidly and accurately predict the insurgencies of the future.