Launched in July 2003, the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) was widely hailed as a textbook case of a sophisticated multinational intervention to stabilize a failing state. Its tenth anniversary prompted a flurry of retrospectives on the extent to which the mission really was such a success story. Most experts continue to give RAMSI high marks for providing the circuit-breaker that halted serious violence and allowing rebuilding to begin. However that acclaim is increasingly accompanied by complaints that such a long and expensive intervention left some of the underlying political, social, and economic causes of the original crisis in place. The recent re-evaluations largely neglect military aspects of the mission. This is understandable since “the only thing all assessors agree on” in evaluating RAMSI is that getting guns off the street was crucial, done quickly, and well. It is nevertheless a pity since studies of the military dimension are largely confined to works by practitioners who were personally involved early on in the mission. Although a book-length U.S. analysis from 2007 focuses on security questions, its assessment period ends before severe problems re-emerged in 2006-07, and it squeezes the RAMSI experience slightly awkwardly into a counter-insurgency (COIN) framework more suited to the sort of higher intensity complex operations then underway in the Middle East