A Thin Blue Line in the Sand

[slapout9]

MASON, thanks. On a more serious note what the article is proposing is nothing but my 4SW theory. The Secret Slapout Shanghai Strategy. Here it is in a nutshell. The way the Shanghai Municipal Police and the China Marines controlled the situation was by dividing and segregating the city by ethnic groups. They then instituted the SMP reserves (trained militia support to police) and one of the most extensive "population pass" id card systems I have ever seen. The Police and reserves were recruited from the" local ethnic "groups who had extensive local intelligence. All under the umbrella of the British led police commission. The Marines protected the International settlement and major American infrastructure and backed up the SMP if needed for major riots,etc. The famous Shanghai Riot Busters and the term "GANGBUSTER" comes from here also.

COIN is simple all these super educated types try to make it complicated. It is nothing but hard ass grinding police work until you begin to stabilize things. Then the "local" leaders can begin to build the type of society that they want!! Which will not be what we want, but we will have truly gained a friend.

[Steve Blair]

MASON, thanks. On a more serious note what the article is proposing is nothing but my 4SW theory. The Secret Slapout Shanghai Strategy. Here it is in a nutshell. The way the Shanghai Municipal Police and the China Marines controlled the situation was by dividing and segregating the city by ethnic groups. They then instituted the SMP reserves (trained militia support to police) and one of the most extensive "population pass" id card systems I have ever seen. The Police and reserves were recruited from the" local ethnic "groups who had extensive local intelligence. All under the umbrella of the British led police commission. The Marines protected the International settlement and major American infrastructure and backed up the SMP if needed for major riots,etc. The famous Shanghai Riot Busters and the term "GANGBUSTER" comes from here also.

COIN is simple all these super educated types try to make it complicated. It is nothing but hard ass grinding police work until you begin to stabilize things. Then the "local" leaders can begin to build the type of society that they want!! Which will not be what we want, but we will have truly gained a friend.

Good points, Slap. I'm working up a paper with a proposed unconventional warfare/COIN reaction force model, and its intent is to work in this way. IMO where COIN becomes "complicated" is when you start having turf wars over who does what (or who doesn't do what depending on the service/organization involved). Some of it may also stem from the US practice of approaching law enforcement and military affairs as two totally separate things (never the two shall meet and all that).

[slapout9]

Steve Metz, you wouldn't recognize Millbrook since the new Hyundai plant has been built here...place is growing by leaps and bounds. I have read some of your papers before. I am reading your new one now, well I printed it off and will read it this weekend. I ways trying to find a paper called Operational Vision:The Way Means reach the End by some guy named John Scholott. It was done in 1992 ever heard of it? Do you know if it is online somewhere? Later

[Steve Blair]

Link to the main citation for it. CARL comes up empty on it, but it's also an older paper.

[SteveMetz]

That's it. I misspelled his name but that is the right paper.

Looks like you could get it from DTIC.

I'll go search the AKO white pages and see if the guy is still in the Army. If so, I'll ask him if he has a copy.

[SteveMetz]

Looks like you could get it from DTIC.

I'll go search the AKO white pages and see if the guy is still in the Army. If so, I'll ask him if he has a copy.

No Schlott in AKO. And the Army War College library doesn't have it. The JFSC library apparently does.

[LawVol]

The article seems to make sense from the security perspective. That is, if your goal is to eliminate AQI and the local Sunnis won't trust the mainly Shia Army, let them form a Sunni militia to do it. However, doesn't this cut against the central COIN tenant of establishing the legitimacy of the government?

Maybe this is indeed necessary, but this path would seem to ultimately lead to, as the author indicates, a partitioned Iraq. If memory serves, imperial powers tried the militia option in the past and found it quite difficult to turn them off once the immediate threat was defeated. Certainly we would see the same thing as I think the Sunni are not likely to lay down arms once AQI is defeated. Wouldn't they come to view these militia as indispensable to their security since they don't trust the Shia?

The whole thing seems rather circular to me: we have a problem and a proposed solution; that solution leads to another problem which leads to another solution which, in turn, leads us back to something similar to the initial problem. I think I'm beginning to understand the soup with a knife analogy. Anyone care to shed some light?