Wilf:

Thought it was interesting that at no time did you mention shoveling billions of unaccountable aid to "friendly" political allies, building roads, schools, etc...

Just killing bad guys, using intelligence (and perhaps wisdom) as a discriminator between good and bad guys. What an interesting new concept for cost effective small wars.

First off, however, there is an army of contractors to feed. What does your concept have to do with them?

Second, both Churchill and Saddam decided that the best way, for example, to cost effectively deal with the Kurds was to gas them, bomb them, and machine gun them from the air.

Their "enemy" was not a bad guy or group of bad guys in a sub-population, but the sub-population itself. Isn't the bad guy to be killed defined by the problem you are trying to solve?

So, isn't the first cost effective step to figure out how to keep the military's role in complex problems limited until you can identify a particular problem, and problem definition, to which costly military solutions can be applied effectively.

Saving money in small wars, in my book, would be by better focusing solutions to fit the problems presented rather than throwing costly solutions on the ground to then seek out problems they could solve.

Examples: Using local, indigenous, or closely related (language, religion, custom) civilian, governance and policing folks to solve as many problems as possible, backed up by relentless military retaliation if they are screwed around with, or something goes bad. That was how the Brits and Pakistanis, for example, had traditionally controlled tribal areas in and around the Durand.

Distilled down, it is not unlike what the Central Highland strategies were all about in Viet Nam (not the whole war).

How did we get into this bewildering situation of pouring billions in cash into countries to, in effect, create much of the problems that we then try to overcome by billions of more dollars, and, in the end, try to tens of thousands of soldiers into to try to unscramble.

Cost effectiveness and targeted killing of bad guys are not synonymous with COIN, nation building and large deployments. Are they?