This is the problem when one writes a guide for Marine and Army Regiments/Brigades and Battalions- one tends to cast very fundamental and universal concepts into the context of the nature and the mission of those US Military forces, rather than in the context of human nature the timeless dynamic of friction between those who govern and those who are governed.
For the manual to have meaningful application it must ultimately get to what these units do and how they can apply what they do to assist in dealing with an insurgency, be that insurgency foreign or domestic, and regardless of what types of tactics any of the operational insurgent groups / individuals decide to employ. But this cannot be the foundation, this must be the structure. The problem with so much of what we do in terms of military doctrine, plans and policies is that we build them upon a foundation of who we are and what we do, rather than a foundation of what the actual problem is.
A recent poster child for this is "irregular warfare." I was scanning an article on "low-intensity conflict" the other day that was written in about 1991 as I recall. "LIC" was one of the many rejected concepts employed for bundling and describing military operations that don't meet the classic Napoleonic/Clauswitzian frameworks of "real" wars, like WWI and WWII. I admit that I have never liked the IW construct; not just for its misuse of both the words "irregular" and "warfare” - but even more importantly to me for how it bundles a wide range of very different types of conflict, requiring equally distinct families of solution, under a single, broad, confusing banner headline. I believe that it is very important that what one calls a problem suggests a family of solution appropriate for that problem. This provides a start point for understanding the particulars of such a conflict when it emerges that we can then tailor our responses based upon the myriad facts that uniquely shape every conflict.
At least LIC was framed by aspects of the conflict itself. IW is more framed by our response to the conflict. Personally I think we probably find more effective large bundling tools if we go with "State-based conflicts" and "populace-based conflicts" as our point of entry for beginning to key out what type of problem we face. In simple terms, the first is "extra" and the second is "entra."
In state-based conflicts two or more Clauswitzian systems of Government-Army-People compete violently for some degree of coercion or dominion over the others. Classic warfare to which Clausewitz applies very well.
In populace-based conflicts there is illegal (and often violent) competition internal to a single Clauswitzian system of Government-Army-People. This creates very unique dynamics due to the nature of the relationship between the contestants. Clausewitz does not apply very well, just as the rules for putting down a riot do not apply very well for dealing with domestic violence inside a household.
Many of our greatest frustrations in our efforts in dealing with populace-based conflicts come from our struggle to modify state-based conflict principles, doctrine and TTPS to somehow fit.
Legitimacy, in particular, political legitimacy, is indeed a crucial concept to any discussion on insurgency or how to deal with an insurgency. But we absolutely mangle the concept beyond repair when we apply convoluted definitions based far more in the context of what we think the solution is than in the context of what we understand the problem to actually be. We think that representative government, governmental security, and effective welfare programs will make the people happy. We also have organizations that we send out to conduct COIN that do those things (DOS, DOD, USAID), so our definition is logical in the context of what we do. But it completely misses the fundamental nature of political legitimacy. Often the system of government we want to sustain in power or elevate into power has very little political legitimacy. This is very inconvenient, so we focus of legal legitimacy instead. After all, we can bestow (or deny) legal legitimacy by fiat from afar in places like the UN floor or the Oval office. But political legitimacy cannot be created or destroyed by governmental mandate.
After a great deal of thought and work on this topic I believe that political legitimacy is simply the recognition by people affected by some system of governance (foreign or domestic, formal or informal) to affect their lives. This is a perception that can be nurtured or undermined from afar, but ultimately has to be earned on the ground among the population group(s) in question. "Hearts and Minds" is a poetic term for political legitimacy. It cannot be "won," it must be earned. Equally important, it cannot be earned by a surrogate and then transferred. Foreign troops cannot create perceptions that the host nation governance is legitimate. Foreign troops can, however, through carefully designed operations, help empower host nation governance to earn this vital perception. This is fundamental to the US approach in both Colombia and the Philippines. The US approach in Afghanistan and Iraq, and frankly everywhere we have pursued AQ across the AFRICOM and CENTCOM AORs over the past dozen years have worked against the development of perceptions of political legitimacy for all of our partners. This is a main reason why there has been such a growth of revolutionary insurgency across the region, and why AQ has proven so hard to squash through our aggressive CT efforts.
In fact, our efforts undermine our own political legitimacy as a foreign power in those same places. We take far too much comfort in the legality of our operations. Increasingly in the emerging strategic environment, where the balance of power will continue to shift from governments towards the people and non-state organizations, legality will not be enough to validate a COA for effectiveness. Increasingly governments must focus upon appropriateness of action over legality of action. Our actions still must be legal, but legal actions deemed as inappropriate pour gasoline on the causation of transnational terrorism against these inappropriate actors. We can see the US government attempting to bring our operations into a more appropriate context in some cases, but I suspect it is far too little and far too late if we attempt to do this on a case by case basis, and then only when some situation blows up in our faces. We need to adopt the prioritization of perceived appropriateness as policy across the board. We generally have a wide range of tactical options available to us, and we have become lazy in defaulting to those approaches that pose the least risk and offer the greatest effectiveness, even though these same options are widely perceives as also being the most inappropriate.
And all of this is related to this fundamental concept of political legitimacy. We can't afford to keep getting this wrong, and FM 3-24 definitely gets it wrong, but no worse than we do in general across our many aspects of US governance that affects the lives of people who live in foreign lands.
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