The actor doesn't need to understand or even know.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Entropy
Interesting graphic, but I'm not sure how useful it is. For example, a significant portion of insurgents in Afghanistan are part-timers who join in for a variety of reasons where do they fit in? Are they really at the political/strategic level of thinking? The point being that insurgents are hardly homogenous and I think at the end of the day the differences between "us" and "them" are not as great as the graphic makes them out to be.
Perhaps an easier way to describe the differences are that insurgents usually have the "home field advantage." Is fighting on and for the "home field" inherently more political/strategic?
Mao named the three phases of Insurgency:
“strategic defensive,” “strategic stalemate,” and “strategic offensive.”
We then renamed these phases U.S. doctrine calls them “latent and incipient,” “guerrilla warfare,” and “war of movement.”
This probably goes to why Neil needed the slide. To our "task-based" way of thinking this was all tactical stuff. Mao was thinking about effects at all three phases.
Look at the Tet Offensive for example. Most NVA and VC were most likely focused on the tactical objectives that they had been assigned. Senior leaders in S. Vietnam were probably most focused on the coordination of the overall offensive on the ground.
But the true impact of this "failed" offensive was a tremendous N. Vietnamese stategic victory back in the US. Did Giap have this as his primary purpose in planning the attack? I don't know. Certainly he hoped for operational success, but I suspect he understood the strategic potential of the offensive as well.
How many battles in the American Revolution were fought with the primary goal not of defeating British forces on the battlefield, so much as to sustain the requisite moral and support of the American populace for the fight, and to garner the support of the French to come to our assistance?
At the end of the day, the tactical scorecard in both wars was largely irrelevant to the final outcome. The insurgent does not have to win the fight to win the war. This is the basis behind Niel's diagram. We have to do both.