Quote Originally Posted by jmm99 View Post
I don't want to be into "kicking down doors and ransacking homes" - I'm a low kinetic person.

I'm positing indigenous "COIN", where the people in my district are my people (some well-guided, some misguided and some uncertain). I'm not positing non-indigenous FID (much less foreign "COIN" or some half-assed form of co-belligerency) because that introduces too much complexity that clouds even more otherwise complex issues that have to resolved first.

Tactical alternatives to "kicking down doors and ransacking homes" abound - basically the opposites are being the bull in a china shop or a boa digesting a meal (making haste slowly). You may judge where you think my ground would be to stand snorting or to lay sleepily.
I'd point out that indigenous COIN is often a very kinetic and very nasty business, and that in many (I'd guess most) areas that are or have recently been threatened by insurgency there's a history of human rights abuse by government forces and a very active distrust of government. I realize that you wouldn't be planning to do any of that stuff, but you'd likely be dealing with the legacy of such actions... if government is liked and trusted and there's no recent history of confrontation there probably won't be much of an insurgency.

I still think you'll have a very, very difficult time persuading the citizenry to reveal their arms holdings, with any strategy.

In some ways your scenario resembles the place where I live. We had an active insurgency going on from the late 70s to the early 90s, and there are still bands of NPA active in the area. From the local view the insurgency was fought to block government plans to dam rivers, log mountains, and set up mines; all those plans were shelved, so the locals see themselves as the winners. From the government point of view the insurgency was a subset of the NPA's armed struggle to topple the government. People here actively dislike the military and don't like them around, but are no longer shooting at them as long as they don't get too aggressive. The image of the NPA is a little better but most people don't want them around either, as wherever they go the soldiers also go.

The populace is heavily and illegally armed, but the weapons are not displayed. The police are local people and are not going to do a thing about it. Military forces know the guns are there but as long as the guns aren't used against them they pretend not to know: they've no desire to stick their heads back into that particular hornet's nest. So the deal is basically that the locals will keep the guns under wraps and not shoot soldiers as long as the soldiers stay low profile and avoid confronting civilians. It mostly works, though it's not ideal.

To illustrate my point above... back in 1988 a group of drunk soldiers fired weapons in the town center here and killed 2 kids, one 2 years old, one 11. Nobody was prosecuted or punished. 20 years have not chilled that memory one bit. My wife still feels very uncomfortable in the presence of anyone from the Philippine military, and most of the populace feels the same way. If the people who shot your kids (it's a tribal society, the kids of one are the kids of all) come around wanting to know how many guns you have, will you tell them?