Al Qaeda in Iraq

[Rank amateur]

That means we need to clear, hold, and build, and not resort to the Vietnam strategy of taking hills just because the enemy is there and then giving them back to him.

Agreed, but isn't that different from attrition.

[Global Scout]

SOF have fixated on the mantra find, fix and finish, which is an attrition strategy, but one that failed us. The conventional forces have also, for the most part, focused on this attrition approach, and again to no end.

My point was this type of strategy could work in some limited cases, such as a small terrorist group that doesn’t have support from the people, such as many left wing terrorist groups in Europe in the 70’s and 80’s. You find and neutralize the leadership, then the threat is over. You already won the population over, they are law abiding citizens who dislike criminals (for the most part). This approach may work if you are able to eliminate the cadre of a budding insurgency before it turns into a movement. Once it is a movement, the attrition strategy won’t work unless you take it to the level that Stalin or Hitler did and wipe out entire populations, and even then the approach is questionable.

In order to win these conflicts, it is essential we have a population focused strategy, which will allow us to separate the population from the insurgents, and if we can do that (if we can’t, then we probably can’t win) it then becomes a relatively easy manner of finding and killing the small percentage of insurgents who won't realize that they are now fighting for a lost cause.

As for the quote about deep experience, I sometimes think that the so called deep experience for most of our senior officers and those who teach academics at their schools is narrowly confined to conventional warfighting, and they try to transfer their conventional maneuver warfare concepts, like culmination points, centers of gravity, etc. to irregular warfare, and it doesn’t work. All it does is distract our planners from the real work of figuring out what needs to be done and doing it. Instead our planners will spend countless hours tripping over mouse turds, and never reach an acceptable answer that will be mutually agreed upon. On the other hand those who actually have muddy boots experience are out there trying to get it done regardless of the inertia at the upper echelons of nonsense with their cool, yet meaningless slides depicting logical lines of operations, decisive points, tactical and operational COGs, etc. Yes, in this experience hinders.

[Ken White]

day that banning Power Point would increase our real war fighting capability by an order of magnitude...

Poor old METT-T is so simple and yet so often ignored in an effort to apply buzzwords to situations where they are an encumbrance.