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Chapter 8 concentrates on how MACV assessed the organizational effectiveness of U.S. Army units serving in Vietnam in 1970. Did officers sense there had been a deterioration of combat effectiveness over time? Much of the Vietnam War historiography comments on the supposed deterioration of troop performance due to drug use, racial tension, and a breakdown in discipline. This chapter investigates how MACV measured such performance. It further asks if it was even feasible for the U.S. Army to withdraw from Vietnam while simultaneously maintaining its overall combat effectiveness.

French surrender in 1940 is typically written as a misleading narrative of wholesale collapse. This chapter re-assesses the surrenders in a variety of sites, scales and contexts: by disorientated army stragglers, by field units, by decisions of commanding generals, city councils and military governors, and by the national political leadership. At all levels, leadership proved decisive. The closer defeat came, though many soldiers actually showed better combat effectiveness, the more the civilians wanted a ceasefire. French surrender is a case of how fighting can end without ending the war for which the fight had been joined.

This chapter introduces the puzzle of the military endurance and combat effectiveness of ISIS/IS, though outnumbered and outgunned by substantially stronger state and nonstate militaries. Beginning with the academic study of insurgency dating back to Lawrence, Mao, Templar, Lansdale, Guevara, Galula, Hoffman and more recent scholars; this book explores traditional factors associated with insurgency success, such as the support of an external power, popular support from the disaffected population, sanctuary, geography or topography, regime type, or other factors, which might, individually or in combination, be explanatory of ISIS/IS endurance and expansion. Most of those factors are found not to be especially significant, so the chapter focuses on the military strategies and tactics employed by ISIS/IS and central to its successes. The chapter then argues that the military tactics employed by ISIS/IS in the four countries and elsewhere better explain their expansion and endurance. The chapter concludes by outlining a framework of analysis explaining ISIS/IS combat effectiveness in the four countries and beyond.

The chapter outlines the research findings on how ISIS fights and what makes it unique in terms of relative combat effectiveness. It presents concluding observations for future research, with finding that a flexible shifting across three major types of strategies, 15 categories of tactics, and multiple operational approaches best explained ISIS success. Its strategic agility, operational adaptability and tactical innovations have made the difference and the chapter explains precisely how that works. The also chapter outlines how ISIS was able to build-up its combat capacities and how it effectively employed them to fight, expand, and endure in four countries. The level of tactical ingenuity and strategic adaptation of the organisation’s “provinces” and combat units is remarkable in comparison with other armed nonstate actors. In the Arab region, the combat effectiveness of ISIS surpasses that of many Arab armies, considering its limited resources. The chapter shows how the highlighted group of case-studies (represented by a sample of ISIS Provinces) poses challenges to some of the literature on military, insurgency and terrorism studies; as well as to some of the security policies employed in the region.