Porch shines a torch on COIN

[Dayuhan]

All very interesting, but of course none of it has anything to do with the point made in my paragraph that generated it.

Perhaps I failed to express the point clearly. Actually two points. First, in the absence of clear, consistent, and achievable goals, "getting it right" on the military level will at best earn transient and localized success. You may win some battles, but you won't win the war. Second, the tactical passivity you decry seems to me largely a consequence of the policy wreckage that I decry. In the absence of clear, consistent, achievable purpose, is it not natural to some extent for those charged with pursuing that purpose to resort to passivity and to focus on protecting their own?

Not that the US military is perfect, but I actually have considerable confidence in their ability to get a job done, provided that the goal is clearly defined and suitable for accomplishment by a military force. If those conditions are absent, we don't need to change the military, we need a better set of goals and we need to choose the right tool for accomplishing the goals.

Perhaps you are right that our efforts in the Philippines so long ago are not relevant, but I disagree. I think military history most always has things that are relevant and there are things to be learned, especially small wars. I am probably wrong but this is because small wars seem to be more matters of people than weapons and tech. Steve Blair (I think) has a quote from Fahrenbach about the frontier Army knowing all there was to know about small war fighting. That surely was another era but things learned then are still relevant I think too.

In the unlikely and unwelcome event that we ever embark on a war of colonial conquest, the lessons of past wars of colonial conquest might be relevant... though I have doubts. Those lessons would point in directions that cannot be pursued today due to domestic and global political constraints, and they would be employed against a rather different class of antagonist. The world does change.

I haven't read the paper yet but will. In the meantime, people always talk about strategy, but I don't know what they mean in the sense of doing. What, in your view, is a strategy that should be applied to South Asia? What should we do or have done and how? That is a big question but I am not looking for a big answer. But I am sincerely at a loss about actual actions when people talk about strategy.

Before you can have a strategy, you need a policy. Policy defines the goals. Strategy defines the broad plan for achieving those goals. Assuring that AQ and similar groups will not be able to find refuge in Afghanistan is a policy goal. The decision to achieve that goal by transforming Afghanistan into a western-style democracy is, IMO, where we went wrong: that goal was not and is not realistically achievable by any means available to us.