Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
...but who are the anti-COIN crowd? No one I know says "we don't do COIN." What I'm against is the "nation building, armed social work," stuff. Securing a population is warfare. It is based in fighting skill.
While no one may say "we don't do COIN" (although Dunlap has come mighty close, IMO), if you look at the historical record it is routinely allowed to drop off the face of the training and planning map. And then it comes up and bites us in the ass with surprising regularity.

My point has always been that you have to preserve the lessons and training for ALL levels and aspects of combat, not just the one you really WANT to do. The Army has historically done a poor job of that, and it's gotten worse in the aftermath of World War 2. I suppose that might be considered acceptable by some, but I wouldn't call it ideal.

And as for "armed social work," although a great deal of the writing on this is overblown and clogged with social science jargon, I think that it's overdue recognition of one of the roles that an army often HAS to assume in the aftermath of a conflict or in a situation that might fall short of full-scale war. The more the West wants to conduct humanitarian aid and other such operations, the more we're going to be drawn into "armed social work." And political realities (even if we don't agree with them) indicate that such aid operations will remain at their current levels if not rise in the next decade or two.

We may just have to agree to disagree here, which is fine. I'm not in favor of an "all COIN" Army, but I also don't want to see us continually relearning the same lessons at a higher cost each time we roll out of the gate.