Posted by Bob,

Trust me, if I could start tossing things into a doctrinal dust bin, "Irregular Warfare" would go in first, and "Security Force Assistance" would be hot on its heels. Then I would take all of the "IW" missions like FID, UW and COIN that have been so vigorously massaged to reflect current whims and good ideas, and rescrub the entire family to get back to basics, filter out the colonial / cold war biases, and clean up the overlaps and gaps.
The entire IW issue since 9/11 has been a less than honest effort to transform the force to deal with what is probably better categorized as low intensity warfare, but all categorizations will miss key elements. IW was used by the services and other elements to justify historical roles. The definition was locked in stone by the former SECDEF, and somehow we managed to describe it as encompassing five our doctrinal missions (CT, COIN, FID, UW, and Stability Operations). Since we were stuck with that to begin with, there was really no need to exert further effort into IW, since we already had doctrine for each of these categories. We missed an opportunity to look at the world from a more holistic view.

As for SFA, I don't follow your resistance against the desire to fix the massive shortcomings in our polices to effectively build partner capacity. SFA is not the same as FID as some (to include some senior SOF officers) frequently claim it is. The fact of the matter is we have bureaucratic processes, laws, and policies that prevent the effective execution of building partner capacity that need to get fixed. It is the right thing to do for the nation, because if we get it fixed we'll actually save billions of dollars over time, and the money we do invest in this endeavor will actually result in partner capacity being developed. We have very few examples of success in this area, especially in recent years. There is much more to it than laws and policies, we need to learn to get away from creating forces and force structure that mirror U.S. forces, but that will be easier if we minimize, not remove, GPF's role in many cases. GPF does what it does, and that is build large and expensive bureaucracies. The return on investment is questionable. In my view we have to get SFA fixed, I don't care what we call ultimately call it, as long as people realize it is larger than FID.