User talk:T30mAnderson/sandbox

Moving this to the Talk page.

Peer Review by Susannah Morrison

You've got some really interesting stuff in here! But there were quite a few places where it felt like ideology was infringing on what you were writing--i.e. at the end of your 'Vietnam to 9/11' section, you were talking about the United States' "unmatched technology and skill in fighting a conventional force" in Operation Desert Storm. Maybe I'm betraying a bias of my own here--I'm ethnically part-Iraqi, and most of my family were killed in American invasions of Iraq--but that line (as well as the entire first paragraph of your 'Counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan' section) stuck out as uncomfortable and jingoistic. There are ways to convey the same factual information dispassionately, without showing a pro-American bias.

In general, your Vietnam to 9/11 section needs to be expanded: you're covering 50 years of history and just barely skimming the surface. Establish more of a background as to why insurgency/counterinsurgency was a risk with the Cold War, and why it mattered in competition with the Soviets.

Likewise, your 'Counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan' section felt like you were biting off significantly more than you can chew. The situation in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't equivalent to each other--they're massively complicated in their own respective ways, and Afghanistan, in particular, felt like it was awkwardly tacked on at the end.

And then your 'Preemptive Counterinsurgency in Africa' section just felt thrown in there. It needs a lot of expansion, analysis, and better contextualization. I'm wondering if you might be better off significantly limiting the scope of your article--you could easily write 1000+ words on any one of these body sections.