New Interagency COIN Manual

[Rex Brynen]

I
With the Bear flying close contact missions over Europe again how long until the shout is "FULDA GAP!"

I hope they're shouting "TALLINN!" or they kinda missed that whole unification of Germany/NATO expansion thing

(Really, Stan ought to be posting this one *lol*)

[Gian P Gentile]

If the American Army had the new FM3-24 and had focused its efforts on training for Coin starting in 2001 would we be in a better situation in Iraq than we are in today? To further this counterfactual, 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.

[Steve Blair]

but it's also based on the assumption that training is a zero-sum game. Either-or. Personally, I think that's the kind of institutional thinking that led to COIN being neglected in the first place and created the need for something like 3-24 to shake up things. But I do agree with Marc in the observation that its long-term impact has a very good chance of being limited.

The situation is very similar to what we saw on an institutional level during Vietnam. Training adjusted to prepare soldiers (to a degree, depending on time frame and branch) for what they'd encounter in Vietnam...but once the conflict started spinning down training switched back to conventional warfare. This also happened during the Indian Wars (although training at the most basic level was never re-oriented to prepare soldiers for what they'd encounter on the frontier...even though this was the only war they had; most advanced training took place within the regiment or company) and just about every other conflict we've had. The institution prefers preparing for large-scale conventional warfare, so that's where the reflexive bias lies.

Will we forget COIN theory again? I certainly hope not. Does that mean the entire Army should focus on COIN? No, but there is no good reason to allow the ideas and practices to slide into the dustbin once we're out of Iraq and Afghanistan (or once the deployments become small enough to be ignored on the larger institutional level).

[Reid Bessenger]

...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.

[Stan]

Hey Rex !

I hope they're shouting "TALLINN!" or they kinda missed that whole unification of Germany/NATO expansion thing

(Really, Stan ought to be posting this one *lol*)

Jeez, a guy can't take his better half out to dinner anymore
It's Friday...already !

There's a very good reason why those prop jobs are no longer near Estonia's borders, we've had NATO fighter patrols since 2004. What's more, October plans include USA F-16 rotations

I wouldn't worry myself over another Fulda Gap, the boys in Moscow are content with sending cockroaches into space

GROUND CONTROL, September 14 (RIA Novosti) - The first experiments are due to begin on board the Foton-M bio-satellite, launched Friday on a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur space center, the head of the project told journalists.

The cockroach-carrying bio-satellite, whose passengers also includes snails, lizards, butterflies and gerbils, took off at 3 p.m. Moscow time (11 a.m. GMT).

The satellite, and its on-board equipment, is functioning normally, and artificial day and night cycles have already been put into motion for the gerbils, the spokesman told journalists.

This BTW, has little to do with this thread !