My friend Andrew Exum recently outed himself as the evil genius behind Abu Muqawama and immediately announced his retirement from blogging. At the time, I predicted that Ex’s retirement was like Jay-Z’s: a pause, not a promise. Sure enough, today he goes over to Small Wars Journal to get super-deep into the doctrinal weeds about counterinsurgency and information operations:

My challenge for this website’s readers, then, is the following: what do we, as counter-insurgency theorists and practitioners, mean when we use the term “information operations?” Do we use IO [Information Operations] as shorthand for psychological operations and message management? Obviously, our definition of IO is different from the definition officially in use. And I suspect our definition has more in common with the way Hizballah or the Taliban thinks about IO than the way in which the lexicographers of the Pentagon think about IO. (That, by the way, is a good thing.) So who out there can propose an alternate definition, and one which we can offer to those in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan? And is “information operations” even an appropriate term for that to which we’re referring?

Consider this Ex’s "Dear Summer."