Porch shines a torch on COIN

[carl]

Just to illustrate, suppose you were a present-day sheriff, or a mayor, in a small racially mixed town in the US with a history of racial issues. One of those places where people know each other by name. If you were to ignore historical context and try to manage those issues in the ways that kept the peace so effectively for your predecessors in, say, the 1950s or the 1920s, how do you think that would work out in today's historical context?

You miss the essentials of police work. Those don't change. You know the people. You know their neighbors, the neighborhood, their relations, where they work and where they play. You know who can be trusted and who can't, who is reliable and who is not. You know the law and you know when to enforce it to the letter and when to use officer discretion and you know who that is going to work on and who it won't work on. You know how to listen and remember what you hear and connect to other things you hear. You talk to people and say hello to them. You don't provoke people needlessly, that makes for bad blood and trouble where it doesn't have to be. You make sure to they know that when you indicate you mean business there is no mistake. The list goes on.

These are the essential things, the fundamental things. They don't change. And they don't change because human nature doesn't change. Some things change, the TV stuff that people associate with actual cop work. Yep, not so much rubber hoses nowadays. Good officers never interviewed that way because they knew it didn't work. But the things that differentiate good police work from bad police work, those don't change.

Similarly, the essentials of small war fighting don't change either. Lt. Johnson and Capt. Pershing would probably have figured things pretty quick if they had been time transported to Afghanistan. Capt. Patriquin and COL McMaster would have figured things out in Moroland with the same alacrity. In my view, small wars are very human affairs which is what makes them so interesting. As such, it is the men who make the difference, their ability to think and figure effectively. That don't change much. Smart men did good then, they do good now. That was Moyar's main point in A Question of Command.