Quote Originally Posted by Gian P Gentile View Post
...if we had focused our training around Coin at the expense of conventional warfighting would the march to Baghdad in March 2003 have looked the same?

Of course counterfactual speculation is just that, speculation.
Much room for different perspectives here. Might it be that the training you refer to in TTP is essential regardless of application, and that COIN begs education foremost? This is no argument that major combat operations require little education, nor that COIN doesn't tax TTP execution or innovation. Rather, I'm trying to paraphrase what you have here to see if I'm tracking. I think that the manual refered to at the beginning of the thread speaks to a factor of integrating sources of national power at a lower level to advantage in COIN as opposed to what can be reasonably expected to work in major combat operations.