Joseph Felter was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. In July 2017, Felter was selected for appointment to the Senior Executive Service, and for assignment as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia.
Felter retired from the US Army as a colonel in 2011 following a career as a Special Forces and foreign area officer. He has conducted foreign internal defense and security assistance missions across East and Southeast Asia and has participated in operational deployments to Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He led the International Security and Assistance Force, Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team, in Afghanistan, reporting directly to Generals Stanley McChrystal and and David Petraeus and advising them on counterinsurgency strategy.
On 23 May 2017, several hundred militants acting in the name of the Islamic State seized control of a portion of Marawi City, in the southern Philippines, after months of preparation and stockpiling of arms and munitions. The group was led by Isnilon Hapilon, a member of the Islamic extremist Abu Sayyaf Group whom ISIS named its Emir for Southeast Asia. Isnilon Hapilon used ISIS’s extremist ideology to galvanize support amongst several disparate extremist groups, most notably Omar and Abdullah Maute, who founded Dawlah Islamiyah.
Technology makes for better weapons—but only until our foes catch up. Why the Pentagon needs to move faster.
A range of breakthrough technologies are emerging today that have the potential to radically change how we fight and deter threats across all conflict domains—air, land, sea, space, and cyber. Artificial intelligence, directed energy, robotics, and machine learning are just a few examples.
In a recent New York Times opinion piece, “Where Terrorism Research Goes Wrong,” social psychologist Anthony Biglan argues that, given the importance of antiterrorism programs and the huge resources devoted to them, far too few are subjected to randomized controlled trials (RCTs) evaluating their efficacy.
Every week, the Islamic State (IS) makes further headlines with its ruthless behavior. The many tactics of IS raises the question: which type of war are we fighting against it?
The future of humanitarian assistance and security policy in chaotic places such as Syria and Iraq could rest on a single question: Does aid in conflict zones promote peace or war? It seems intuitive to assume that hunger and exposure push people to violence and that aid should, therefore, lead to peace.
An important first step in rebooting U.S. Middle East policy and more effectively addressing the roots of the problems that have manifested into threats to U.S. and international security demands that we more holistically embrace Sun Tzu’s maxim of the importance of knowing one’s enemy.
At the tactical level, air-delivered munitions can significantly degrade the ability of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, to mass their forces or employ artillery, mortars, rockets and other weapons that can have a devastating impact on civilians as well as Iraqi military forces in the field. We’ve seen air power achieve positive results in other cases.
Retired Colonel Joseph Felter explains the problems facing America in Afghanistan and what the United States can do to address them.