Paper - Economics in COIN

It is estimated that the Department of Defense (DoD), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Department of State (DoS) combined spent over $100 billion in reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. The Commission on Wartime Contracting estimates that much of this money was lost due to fraud, waste and abuse. Employing economics in a stability situation such as Afghanistan always presents challenges. However, many problems in this field were the result of the lack of an overall unified strategy for economic reconstruction. This paper compares previously deployed economic development plans (WWII and Vietnam) to efforts undertaken in Iraq and Afghanistan. Read "Economics in Counterinsurgency Operations", by Hayes J. Weidman, IAS-004, March 2015. The paper is a special study published by the Simons Center for Interagency Cooperation.

http://thesimonscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/IAS-004-March15.pdf