Strategy begins with empathy: Netflix series "Colony"

[Azor]

Yes, TV shows are TV shows. One can fixate on tactical facts and miss the larger picture, or one can step back a bit and consider the nature, rather than the character of a conflict from a different perspective.

Well, earlier you said that Colony was “an analogy for the US occupations of places like Afghanistan and Iraq”. On the contrary, it is an analogy for popular American perceptions of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly in the minds of those that never participated and who know the occupation only through what they saw and read in the mainstream media.

You also noted that the fact that the audience is meant to identify with and build empathy for the resistance is a “twist”, and yet it is a well-worn one, from the various film and television about German-occupied Europe (actual and alternative such as An Englishman’s Castle) to those about the Troubles (Crying Game, In the Name of the Father), and to similar ones involving aliens such as Star Wars (1977) and V (1983). Colony is treading old ground, and even the references to the US military aesthetic of the War on Terror can be found in 2009’s Avatar.

If your “larger picture” is that the “invader” is “fundamentally illegitimate”, then that applies as much to the Union soldiers in Confederate territory and Allied soldiers in the ruins of Germany, as it does to the Soviets in eastern Poland, the French in Indochina or the Americans in Afghanistan.

If one has no legitimacy on the territory of an other on the basis of not being an other, than a simple solution presents itself: use standoff weapons to pulverize any threatening person or object on that territory, without occupying it. It would have been far easier for the United States to turn North Vietnam into a wasteland and prevent the orderly unification of Vietnam under the North, than it was to preserve South Vietnam. It would have been far easier for the United States to wipe out the Taliban from the air in 2001, let the Northern Alliance do what they could, and come back if new terrorist camps spring up

Where the United States went wrong with its interventions, was when it wasn't prepared to do what was necessary to accomplish its objectives. It had all sorts of preferences, but the efforts were on the whole half-hearted, and this is true of Vietnam on. Note that all of the successes I listed earlier involved these countries being fully integrated into American economic and defense relationships.

US COIN or FID then became a fluid blend of cynical kinetic operations combined with disinterested attempts to "win hearts and minds". The US then tried to remake Iraqi state and society on the cheap, which meant cannibalizing resources in Afghanistan that were being used to build that country's first viable state in over 30 years.

Nevertheless, all of these insurgencies required massive foreign support in order to make life difficult for the United States.