A Termination of Intellectual Cowardice LTC Joseph Myers

Pentagon specialist on Islamic law and Islamist extremism, Major (USAR) Stephen Coughlin was to my knowledge the only Islamic Law scholar on the military Joint Staff.

He is a lawyer by training and a reserve Military Intelligence Officer. His first interface with Islamic Law began in Pakistan where he was investigating and prosecuting an intellectual property rights case about 10 years ago. Reviewing Pakistani property rights law, he kept seeing footnoted references to the Quran and Sharia law.

I have long argued and wondered why our military, from senior leaders down to tactical level, are so unread and unstudied on Islam, jihad in Islam, even the topic of terrorism. I have often contrasted this unconscionable wartime state of affairs, with the due diligence the US military showed since I was a cadet at West Point 30 years ago, where we lived, ate, slept and drank Soviet warfighting doctrine. It was the threat we oriented on and we developed our own doctrine around-- “Air/Land Battle” in the early 1980’s.

Can anyone show me where the equivalent of the Soviet threat doctrine series for the global war on terror is published?

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