Strategy in Afghanistan: could the US have done better?

[TheCurmudgeon]

I am flabbergasted at this statement. I am sure that armies trained to fight insurgencies need different skills than HIC but who says there is only one way to fight an insurgency and COIN as envisioned on paper by the American military in FM 3-24 is the only way to do it?

So, instead of thinking of something new you want people to double down on what didn't work in Vietnam and Afghanistan?

We misread the strategic environment in Afghanistan, thought FM 3-24 based on Vietnam and Iraq and colonial small wars and modernization theory would work when there are a million ways to go about countering an insurgency, had overly ambitious goals, got sent off to Iraq in the middle, had a weird relationship with NATO (who was really in charge?) and so on.

What evidence is this based on?

PS: The Army always has to be ready to fight a near peer competitor because that's part of your job too and if you don't think it is, we should just disband you. And, to be honest, I'm not sure even fighting a near peer competitor would out well for us at this point.

Insurgency fighting via third party COIN via the US has a dismal track record and last time around, the President asked for something else besides pop COIN to work in Afghanistan. He got three pop COIN solutions from the military. That is exactly the opposite of what you are saying. The military was asked for a variety of solutions to a policy and got only one way to do things instead of options.

PPS: Er, am I misunderstanding your point?

The short answer is, yes you misunderstand my point. First, let me be clear that the military MUST be capable of conducting HIC. The fact that we are so good at it is part of the reason that there are no near peer competitors. No one sees any possible way to take us on head-to-head so we effectively deter aggression. I am not advancing the idea that we give that up and return to a world where any number of nations feel that using their military to get what they want is a viable option.

No, I am not endorsing COIN as outlined in the FM 5-34. I believe it has some very serious flaws.

What I am saying is that the world has changed. The change is the result of numerous factors from our superiority at HIC, which means that political confrontation now moves from direct conflict to proxy wars; to democracy becoming a more prevalent, if not dominant political system; to the fact that international trade has limited the need for wars of economic gain; to the ubiquity of free flowing commutations. The conflicts of the future will look more like the conflicts of the recent past (40 years) than like the conflicts of the more distant past (41+ years). The military has not cracked the code on this type of conflict with its significantly political nature. The problem is that we do not really want to try. The mistakes we have made in the past will be repeated in the future until we rethink how to organize for a completely different type of fight.

In the not so distant past the US military created Special Forces to help conduct the type of fight I am talking about. What I am advocating is expanding on that concept and create an expanded capability with a specific mission of fighting wars amongst the people. I am not sure that exactly that would look like, but I am fairly certain it does not look like an heavy BCT.