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

[SteveMetz]

I say this respectfully to you, Steve; but I believe that you are wrong. As soon as we develop theories and arguments to show that a "counterinsurgency war" like Iraq is not war that it is something else then that is what causes us to loose and not the other way around as you say. Would, say for example, Cavguy, or RTK, or former operator Tom Odom agree that counterinsurgency is not war, or even except your premise that even if it is then we need to adjust our thinking in how we view it and change it into something else so that we can mire ourselves in places like Iraq for generations?

And I don’t think you can parse things so neatly as to say well at the tactical level for the lieutenant or captain it is war but at the higher strategic and political level it is not. That sort of thinking is wrongheaded and attempts to place war into a neatly compartmentalized analytical box with no true meaning as to the inter-connected relationship of millions of variables that defines war in all of its levels and conditions.

gian

War entails organized violence but not all phenomena that involve organized violence are war. War is a political conflict that can be resolved by organized violence. There are other types of political conflict that involve organized violence but cannot be resolved by it alone.

As brilliant as Clausewitz was (and with a bow to my friends who are Clausewitzeans like Chris Bassford and Colin Gray), I don't consider him an astute grand strategist.

I believe Americans elect to treat political conflicts that are not amenable to resolution solely or primarily by armed force as if they are simply because we are good at warfighting, not because that reflects reality or is the most effective option. To slightly revise the old canard, when the best tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything like a nail. In counterinsurgency, we attempt to do carpentry by relying on a hammer. You need a hammer to do carpentry but if you rely on it, you're going to be a pretty lousy carpenter.