Nations have conducted many Counterinsurgency Operations throughout history. Lessons learned from these battles have been documented, but not always used for future operations. Understanding past successes and failures is critical to planning and executing any battle or war. Lessons learned from past conflicts will not provide a complete guide to winning wars, but will provide a basic understanding of war theory that can be applied to current situations. Many past failures can be directly contributed to the lack of applying lessons learned from history. This paper will focus on comparing two counterinsurgency operations. The United States successfully applied lessons learned during the Philippine Insurrection. Nearly a half decade later, the United States failed to apply these same lessons learned in Vietnam. This comparison will illustrate how applying lessons learned from past conflicts can make the difference between winning and losing wars.

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