I just finished Fabius's article, not bad, although I don't agree with much of it, I do understand his position now.

Fabius states the obvious, which is that the home team has the advantage. This has always been true in every war we fought, so it is illogical to assume to this advantage always equates to victory. The fact is that it is not always possible to find indigenous personnel to do your dirty work (surrogate or unconventional warfare), and even when it is possible, it isn’t always desirable. We were doing a regime change, and while the Kurds and Shi’a supported seeing Saddam disposed, only the Kurds were willing to work with the U.S.. The Kurds are great warriors, but they are also a political liability, so their utility was limited. Non Kurds didn’t like seeing armed Kurds in their neighborhood. If our objective is a unified Iraq, then the perception we’re siding with one ethnic group has more disadvantages than advantages. The same can be said about using the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. We simply flipped the coin (NA on top, Taliban on the bottom); we didn’t really change the underlying conflict conditions. In my opinion we have lofty ideals that are not achievable (e.g. “imposing” democracy on a society that clearly isn’t ready for it), but that doesn’t mean our military strategy is flawed, it means our political strategy is. Yes they go hand in hand, but they are two different hands, and in this case the left hand is dysfunctional, because it doesn’t understand the limitations of the right hand.

Another point on so called home turf advantage is that it is very much localized, as there are cultural sub-states within most nations. I don’t fit in well in Latino or Black neighborhoods, and nor do I fit in well in a fundamentalist Baptist town in Alabama. You can be a foreigner within your own nation, so achieving true home turf advantage using an indigenous army is normally a bridge too far.

Furthermore, we're not losing in Iraq because we don't have home turf advantage, we're losing because we had no plan to transition from combat operations to stability operations (it was supposed to happen magically according to Wolfowitz), so we created a big gap where there was little or no control (remember we liberated Kuwait, we didn’t liberate Iraq, the difference is crucial), and that gap allowed chaos to grow to the tipping point. Several actors emerged in this gap quickly pushing the situation into a state of anarchy in many regions.

This wasn’t a preplanned insurgency, because the regime didn’t plan on losing, and many Iraqi Military leaders were waiting to join the coalition (as promised), so this was an emerging crisis that could have been mitigated with martial law, enforced by the U.S. military in parallel with the Iraqi Army (which was the original plan, until Bremer made the biggest strategic mistake in U.S. history when he disbanded them). Then to add fuel to our incompetence fire, we denied the nature of the conflict (we don’t have an insurgency), and we didn’t have enough troops to react with.

The reason I'm revisiting all of this is to point out that even if our COIN doctrine fails us in Iraq at “this time”, it isn't because our doctrine isn't valid (it may or may not be), but rather that we applied it too late. We're in a different type of conflict now, and more U.S. troops, more advisors, and more jobs more jobs may help (they definitely would have helped in 2003), it may also be too late for this approach, since Humpty Dumpty already fell off the wall.

We failed originally because we refused to recognize the insurgency, now we’re failing to recognize the Civil War, so we still seem to be behind the power curve. Will our COIN doctrine work in the midst of a Civil War, I don't think it will. What we need now is a peace enforcement strategy with zones of separation, agreements between the belligerents, and then strive for political agreement (compromise, so hard to come by in the ME). It is a complex playing field with tribes, religion wars, freedom fighters (those trying to eject the coalition), organized criminals, transnational terrorists, foreign players (Iran, Syria, Turkey, others), etc. We need our best minds at the strategic level (realists, not idealists) to come up with workable solutions.

Fabius from my perspective as a participant in 2003, I would argue that if every Company Commander and his Bn and BDE Cdrs had Kilcullen's 28 articles (and understood the intent) we would have created some breathing space, perhaps enough to allow for a functional political strategy to develop. You look at other divisions compared to the 101st in Mosul at that time, you can see the disparity. The 101st applied COIN doctrine and achieved a remarkable degree of stability (it was still a tough fight), while others simply made the situation much worse. Operations at the tactical level have strategic impact.

What you're saying is true now because we failed to follow our doctrine, not because of our doctrine.

Bill