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We need aptitude far more than skills. The role of Special Forces is not to fix broken governance, but rather to understand and leverage the energy that broken governance generates within the...

Nations are rarely at war, which is not the same as an absence of conflict. The US has not been at war since 1945 - but we often have troops engaged in various conflicts here or there. Heck, we...

Reorganization is what military leaders do when they know things aren't as good as they could be, but have no real idea what the problem is or how to fix it.

A couple of "simple" fixes:

1. We...

Who is the "honest broker"? That is a good question. I don't know. How does one be an honest broker when working within an organization that is by its very nature biased due to an overarching...

Bill,

This gets to what I think "Whole of Government" really needs to mean: Not that we all pull together to try to sustain the unsustainable, or to fix the unfixable.

Rather,...

What American leaders, policy and doctrine struggle to recognize, is that those affected by our actions care little for our good intentions.

We can appreciate why a Russian invasion of Afghanistan...

Between "dominate the enemy" and "stabilize" there is a missing step :"prevent, resolve or defeat the resistance."

As I said up front, a resistance insurgency is a continuation of warfare, and the...

Argh...not the "phase" word.

Better question, what is the natural human response to a foreign power invading their homeland and defeating their government and security forces? A blend of...

For the US, dealing with Ferguson effectively is COIN. Dealing with ISIL is not COIN for the US at all.

In fact, now that the Iraqi state has divided and a separate system of governance around...

For me one must apply the flagpole test.

Go the capital of the place you are at to deal with an insurgency, find the tallest flagpole and look to the top of that pole. If it is the flag of your...

But that is just tactics. There are many paths (tactics) up the mountain (good governance), and when the government seeks to deny some segments of the population access to the mountain, or to block...

The weakest part of Galula is his perspective on the role of his own nation in the insurgencies he dealt with through his life. He could see the people and the domestic government with great clarity...

The US Joint Pub 3-24 stands (shakily) upon this definition of insurgency:



The danger of lists: "Insurgency uses a mixture of subversion, sabotage,
political, economic, psychological...

So, most violence is not war. I am comfortable with that.

My primary thesis I am offering here is that political conflict within a single system of governance is fundamentally different in nature...

Bill, our challenge is not due to a misunderstanding of "the job of war" - our challenge is that we too often apply a war solution to problems that are not war.

We then write off the resultant...

One thing I do believe strongly when it comes to defining things is that if one is creating something one can define that thing to whatever it is we want it to be; but, if instead we are seeking to...

Slap, I read a pretty good book on this a couple years ago, and as I recall without going back to do the research, the '79 movement in KSA that took the Holy Mosque in Mecca (and the separate but...

When I say "political entities" or "political systems" I am not comfortable myself that those are the best terms, but to be clear, I do not mean this is limited to "states" or that the political...

Remember, a main point of this thread is to discuss that most insurgency is not war at all. Resistance between two distinct political systems fits the war paradigm; but revolution within a single...

Slap, religion is one of the primary types of ideology employed in insurgency, but remember, Galula was a counterinsurgent, not an insurgent. He looked at the problem through the biased eyes of a...

Slap,

What is a "religious insurgency"?? I mean, I get it, that it that often the identity-based population group that is oppressed or discriminated against by the governance over them to...

There is an old saying in the infantry: "Every form of maneuver is frontal assault for the lead squad."

While that is true, and largely unavoidable, once one steps back and looks as the larger...