“’Dishonest Doctrine:’ Or, How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Coin Doctrine”

[Ken White]

. . .
Ken - You are the only guy I know who has experience, the institutional knowledge to have lived it, thought about it, read about and wrote about it. What do you think?
Best Regards, Rob

LINK.

An aside; I think the thread is getting wrapped around semantics; an issue on which there'll be many different approaches or answers -- and there probably is not a 'correct' answer...

Only slightly more concisely than my previous comment ; what I think is that 'war' implies conflict or combat. When you're in one you know it but aren't concerned about the esoteric arguments of what 'it' is. One does not engage in (as opposed to provide aid or efforts in support of) COIN unless one is at war; COIN entails killing and dying at base or tactical level and political finesse at that and higher levels (not, BTW, one of the US' strong points...). A COIN campaign IS the operational level of war for the Nations involved, no more and no less. The strategy put us in the Nation wherein the campaign takes place, the operational level is the COIN effort and it and the Tactical level operations and all the TTP must be tailored to achieve the political ends of that particular National effort -- and each COIN campaign is different (thus we have to be careful not to draw too many 'lessons' from a specific campaign).

Most insurgencies end up being wars of attrition with the insurgents simply trying to outlast their opponents (see American Revolution; Malaya,Viet Nam; AQIZ and many others).

Given the above generic strategy by insurgents, our political ineptitude, the national trait of impatience, todays communications capability, our unwillingness to train properly and completely and a few other factors, I believe we should avoid COIN efforts unless there is no other option and we should try to shape conditions to use our strengths in breaking things and people, fixing things, cobbling solutions together and doing all that rapidly.

To do that we need far better intel than we have had before -- thus my request for Global Scout (the missing capability, not the specific poster here ).

Regardless of my belief that we should avoid COIN if possible, it may not always be possible and we must acknowledge that and be prepared. Our first effort should be to send in the specialists at as low key as is possible. We may have to commit the GPF / MPF and they must have some COIN training but they MUST remain a full spectrum force and while COIN is demanding, HIC is even more so thus our doctrinal and training focus must reflect that.

We are capable of doing that and doing it well. Whether we do it or not remains to be seen...