Researcher ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0009-0009-9297-7209
Graduation Year
2026
Date of Submission
4-2026
Document Type
Campus Only Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Government
Reader 1
Professor Jordan Branch
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2026 Kit Kumar
Abstract
This thesis tests whether the abandonment of US population-centric counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan was driven by tactical failure, by shifting public opinion, or by a binding fiscal constraint that strategy alone could not absorb. Existing scholarship treats the Global War on Terror’s strategic exhaustion as a story of military missteps or eroding political will; the institutional and economic mechanisms that forced the doctrinal retreat across three successive presidential administrations have been comparatively underexamined. The investigation combines process tracing of executive-branch decision documents, content analysis of military doctrine and oversight reports (including the 700-plus audits produced by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction), and a five-scenario comparative financial model of five principal contractors — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, KBR, and Parsons — across the fourteen fiscal years from 2002 to 2015. The model stress-tests each contractor’s three-statement performance under five postures: actual base case, sustained ramp-up, frozen 2007 surge, light-footprint counterterrorism, and arms-export-only.
Three quantitative findings anchor the argument. First, US direct overseas-contingency expenditure on the two campaigns approached two trillion dollars cumulatively, peaking at $176.7 billion in fiscal year 2010. Second, the differential between the actual base case and the counterterrorism-only counterfactual — the “COIN premium” — totals $364.9 billion in incremental contractor revenue across the five firms. Third, contractors captured only 0.6 to 1.2 percent of incremental overseas-contingency spending in the surge scenario; the remaining 98.8 to 99.4 percent fell on personnel, ammunition, equipment, and the long-tail obligations of veterans’ care and debt service. The thesis introduces “fiscal hysteresis” to name this last category — the path-dependent fiscal burden that persists for decades after operational decisions are reversed. The bipartisan convergence across the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations on COIN’s unaffordability, set against the asymmetry between concentrated private gains and diffuse public liabilities, suggests that strategic doctrine in a democratic state is subordinate to the political economy that funds it. Any strategy demanding sustained foreign deployment must therefore be stress-tested against the material capacity of the treasury that pays for it, and the constituencies most empowered to advocate for a strategy are not necessarily those most exposed to its long-run costs.
Recommended Citation
Kumar, Kit, "Justifications and J-Curves The Implications of the US Counterinsurgency Doctrine on Civilian and Military institutions" (2026). CMC Senior Theses. 4119.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/4119
This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.
