As a 4th year PhD Candidate in Political Science at Stanford University, Vincent Bauer is writing his dissertation on how tactical-level military units in Afghanistan implemented the comprehensive counterinsurgency doctrine adopted by the US Army in late 2006. He argues that the conditions faced during counterinsurgencies incentivize military organizations to grant significant discretion to tactical units. The primary factors driving this decision are the internalization of costs by tactical level units and ambiguity about which tactics will be most effective in any given area. Bauer is keen to use the TSAS network to get valuable feedback on his project from academics and practitioners specialized in counterinsurgency and responses to terrorism.
Bauer’s dissertation research is driven by his passion for developing evidence-based solutions to mitigating armed conflict. His professional objective is to provide policy makers with unbiased, non-partisan foreign policy advice. Before graduate school, Vincent was a Research Associate at the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism (CPOST), a policy-focused research lab at the University of Chicago. He is currently a Graduate Fellow with several organizations aimed at ‘bridging the gap’ between academia and policy makers including the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN) and the International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network (IPSCON). For the 2018-2019 academic year, he is a visiting scholar at the MIT Security Studies Program. Beyond his dissertation, his research on the Pakistani Taliban and the Islamic State has been published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution and Foreign Affairs. He speaks Arabic and has spent six months living in Amman, Jordan and three months in Beirut, Lebanon.
