Reddit reviews The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One

Accidental Guerilla: https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Guerrilla-Fighting-Small-Midst/dp/0199754098

Counterinsurgency: https://www.amazon.com/Counterinsurgency-David-Kilcullen/dp/0199737495

Joint Publication 3-24 Counterinsurgency: https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/pubs/jp3_24.pdf

FMFRP 12-18: Mao Tse-tung on Guerilla Warfare

The section about Jamaica was absolutely wild. Honestly, reading that book, there were sections where I had to put it down for a second, go, "Jesus fucking Christ" and push back the existential terror, then continue on. Like the bit about how those raiders in Mumbai had to kill a lot of Westerners - not to prove any political point, but because the command center needed a big Twitter presence to provide on-the-fly intel to the raiders, and the easiest way to get Twitter to start paying attention was to kill people who are part of a network that uses Twitter. All those little details really blew my mind.

He doesn't paint a very hopeful picture for the future of the planet. On the flipside, though, the fact that a dude who participated in counter-insurgency operations can see clearly that a lot of future threats will be "wars without enemies" (or whatever he refers to resource scarcity/infrastructure failure as) is kind of heartening. His arguments about effective governance and management of infrastructure also kind of shows that the end game of counter-insurgency studies is basically going to be, "Govern fairly and give people what they need to live, then they won't try to kill you." It'll just be curious to see how many people like Kilcullen reach that logical conclusion.

I'm hopefully going to crack into The Accidental Guerrilla tonight.

Oh what specifically?

As far as East Asia/Indian Ocean stuff, Robert Kaplan is a pretty good introduction. His book Monsoon is a really good primer on the history of the Indian Ocean region, and it's ongoing (and increasing) importance in international politics. His new book Asia's Cauldron is promising, I haven't read it yet but it is a contemporary and forward looking take at the South China Sea and its role in shaping the future of international relations in the region. I actually just bought it the other day and will be reading it soon (spending the next 18-33 months abroad doing various things). Kaplan's books tend to be a very readable mix of history, personal anecdotes, and political analysis. Sometimes he can get a bit full of himself, especially in sections of Monsoon, but he does a great job at making what he writes accessible to a wide audience while still being at least interesting to read for academics.

For a primer on broad international relations, International Politics is a great starting point. This was my introduction to the field, and while it can be quite dense, it is very informative. It is a collection of essays and articles that is aimed at an intro level IR class (100 level), so while it is certainly on the academic side of things, it is still very approachable, so long as you have the patience to occasionally look up terms and concepts, for someone with no academic background in the subject.

As far as a general reading on grand strategy, I have only heard amazing things about Charles Hill's Grand Strategies. Basically it examines military grand strategy from a historical perspective, the politics behind the strategy, and also ties it into popular literature (such as Shakespeare) in order to make the concepts approachable and digestible for the average person.

For modern military theory that is applicable to today's world, and probably worth understanding given what has been going on in the world for the past decade and what continues to happen, you might be interested in David Kilcullen's The Accidental Guerrilla. Kilcullen has two major books on insurgency, one is Counterinsurgency which is a higher level approach to the topic, while Accidental Guerrilla is a distillation of his observations and studies on counterinsurgency viewed put into a framework that would be easier for the average person to understand.

Admittedly I am a bit biased, as Francis Fukuyama is a family friend, but his latest works The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay are great looks into how and why the state system arose, as well as flaws in political systems, corruption, etc.

His earlier (and more famous) book, The End of History and the Last Man is still a very interesting read, although without the proper framing it can be a bit odd in the current global political climate. It works off of a concept that I think is best described in Phillip Bobbit's The Shield of Achilles, which Bobbit terms the "long war". The grand concept of the Long War is that the game changing interstate conflicts throughout history have predominantly been between different types of states. It is a bit of a Darwinist look at state politics and political order, seeing different political models (democracy, communism, fascism, monarchy, etc) as directly competing, and there being a series of successors. The End of History works off of a similar premise, basically saying that once the Soviet Union collapses (it was originally formulated as a series of articles in the late 1980s), Liberal Democratic Capitalism would be the predominant political system, and that it would mark the "end of history" as we knew it up to that point. History had been dominated by massive regional and worldwide conflicts between states that often differed in structure, and that once all the major powers had pretty much gotten to the point of L-D-C, then interstate conflict as we knew it would cease to exist. Obviously conflict still exists, but it is much harder to imagine a World War III in todays world, despite tensions with Russian and China, than it would be just 30 years ago.

A good book to read is, The Accidental Guerrilla by David Kilcullen. He explains in depth the cycle of insurgency.

But to answer OPs question. Yes military action is vital to ending terrorism. I look at terrorist groups no differently as gangs in the USA. They exist mainly because no effective government or order exists in those areas. If we stopped patrolling lets say Baltimore would you expect an increase or decrease in gang activity? You’d see an increase like we did after the Freddie Grey incident which led to a wave of homicides.

So can we flood the area with cops/military? In the short term yes it’ll suppress the gangs/terrorist. But in the long term you have to address/fix why they exist.

Here is why I'm not wrong regarding these issues:

Torture is less effective than other methods of interrogation as you can see in the Senate Intelligence Committee's report, and testimony from former FBI agents. However, more importantly, torture is immoral and violates the principals on which America was founded.

If you're suggesting I'm wrong about Trump supporting torture, I would suggest that you read the following articles:

http://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/trump-torture/
http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/06/politics/donald-trump-torture/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-torture-waterboarding_us_5775d740e4b04164640f6597

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Attacking civilians, like torture, undermines America's long standing position that it tries to be a force for good. Additionally, it radicalizes large portions of the populace of any nation we are in against us; since people are unsure if they will be targeted and are more likely to know people who died. For better options, I'm going to suggest reading David Kilcullen's books Counterinsurgency and The Accidental Guerrilla.

Here is evidence that Trump supports attacking civilians:
https://thinkprogress.org/trump-i-would-intentionally-kill-families-to-defeat-isis-b5484a36a7a2#.o3xtgsik4
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-reiterates-sire-to-murder-terrorists-families-a6912496.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/us/politics/donald-trump-mosul-iraq.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/10/11/donald-trump-wants-a-sneak-attack-on-mosul-but-reality-is-more-complicated/

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Regarding climate change, I'm going to link NASA's page regarding it as it contains more links and evidence than I would take the time to link here.

These articles demonstrate that Trump does consider climate change a hoax:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/03/hillary-clinton/yes-donald-trump-did-call-climate-change-chinese-h/
https://www.factcheck.org/2016/11/the-candidates-on-climate-change/

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Though Stop & Frisk may find some criminals, it was clearly racist in its implementation. Despite finding white criminals at a higher rate than black or hispanic criminals, whites were stopped far less.

Here is Trump supporting Stop & Frisk:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/28/nyregion/what-donald-trump-got-wrong-on-stop-and-frisk.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/09/28/trumps-false-claim-that-stop-and-frisk-was-not-ruled-unconstitutional/

I wouldn't plan on killing people either and I'm not defending suicide bombers. You might benefit from reading The Accidental Guerrilla. It might give you a broader view on the world.

Even if AQ does not exist in the manner you think it does, the ideology behind it is a driver for actions that people have undertaken. That means that it does exist and has had an effect on the world. You can deny that a main organization exists, or that they undertook certain actions, but you cannot deny that the idea of them has driven people to actions. That in itself means it exists in some way. I take it on step further and believe this idea was created by an organization in a way to propagate itself (Edit: Their ideology). My real world evidence comes from trusting of real world accounts presented to me second hand, but I do trust the sources that have encountered them in real life.

Further edit: Read this book and tell me this man has written several items on a related topic including a group that doesn't exist.