All politics is not insurgency, but all insurgency is political. If not political, such as the drug business related conflict in Mexico, it isn't insurgency.
Just like all war is politics, but not all politics is war.
But not all political conflict is war either, certainly revolutionary political conflict internal to a state is very different in nature (cause and cure) than political conflict between states, such as occurs in conventional warfare or resistance insurgency.
But the VC were to the NVA just as the Militia were to Washington's Continental Army. Our history likes to separate the two, so that we can claim a COIN victory against the VC and then blame a conventional loss against the NVA as something that happened to ARVN after we lost. That is an artificial construct. Just as the creation of two states, North and South, in mid-insurgency, was an artificial construct. Convenient labels that box in our thinking.
But one must understand the political causal essence of conflict if one is going to then shape a military effort that is likely to facilitate a political victory. Too often we refuse to recognize the inconvenient truth of the political essence, as it runs counter to our approved narrative or objectives or both. When we allow that to happen, as we did in Vietnam and as we do today in Afghanistan, it leads us to misapply the military. We fight the conflict as we have defined it conveniently in our minds, rather than the conflict as it actually exists before us. That is why we lose those conflicts.
Now to DPRK. We run the risk of creating a convenient construct for the populace of DPRK to act IAW as well, and our belief in that construct could lead us to make tragic miscalculations regarding our peacetime approaches now, or our approach to any potential conflict that could arise some day.
To wish away the likelihood of a popular resistance to any form or occupation due to our misguided belief that what we bring is so good that the affected populace will embrace it, or that some misguided concept of "sanctuary" not being available will prevent a resistance, or that because their might not be a foreign sponsor for the resistance that the people will not employ what they have at hand, are all forms of the type of wishful thinking that we apply far too often.
We refuse to learn the strategic lessons of populace-based conflicts because to do so forces us to accept hard truths about ourselves. This in turn leads us to write the same flaws of past plans that led to the creation of the insurgencies that stymied us into our plans for future conflicts. The cycle continues to repeat itself. Human nature at work. It is human nature to resist on one hand, and it is equally human nature for government to not see the flaws of its ways.
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