IW and Stability Operations - in your own words - what is the difference?

[Rob Thornton]

Hi Bill,
Thanks for bringing up some great points on what Ken rightly termed "an odd thread".

The bottom line is that an insurgency can survive for ever without evolving into conventional warfare. Sometimes all they want is the ability to control a certain area or certain ethnic group, and the cost for the government to reestablish control is too high, so they acquiesce.

I'd agree. Vin diagrams (or any model) are limited in their ability to establishing proportionality - people have to do that based on assessment of the conditions. I think it (the proportionality of one over the other) could stay anywhere within those circles for a number of reasons. I now understand where GS was going when he voiced his concern about one evolving or devolving into another.

I think that is one of the reasons its critical to evaluate the conditions and look at the context in which the fighting is taking place.

They start a life of crime to sustain their organization, then the business model tends to trump their ideological cause and now you have a very dangerous organized criminal group. The thesis on 3d generation gangs was superb and I agree it needs more study, but I'm not sure it is a separate bubble.

I'd agree - I'm not sure it does either, but then again I'm not convinced it doesn't - from what I've seen within the same AO you can have some groups that remain pure, some groups that dabble in the criminal end, and some that are purely criminal - this makes for a very messy center- particularly for us when we're trying to sort out responsibility and causality so we can allocate the right efforts and resources - no easy answers there. You could reserve the space for anything that represents a third part (outside of the populace) that wiled influence and adds complexity - if its useful in working through framing.

When I read FM 3-0 I thought it did list stability operations as part of conventional warfare, not just a component of IW? There were three major types of operations: offense, defense, and stability, but the percentage of the force/effort dedicated to a particular operation would vary depending on a number of factors and where you were on the continuum. I think stability operations is now a phase in the joint pub after achieving dominance? It also realizes that the battlespace is not contiguous, so like the three block war (at a much larger level) it anticipates doing all operations simultaneously. Not sure that makes teh DOTMLPF outputs any easier though.

I think that is where Army may differ from others- Army sees SO as broader then IW - as being something you may be called to do regardless of the type of warfare (or the dominance of one over the other) being conducted. However, if you take the tack that there will always be some form of IW being conducted then you might fit SO within IW. Allot I think depends on what lens you look through - that is why I think a linear or phased perspective is more constraining then a perspective that should lead you to considering the conditions at hand and trying to work out what is actually going on. Diagrams are only useful in getting you the first look or maybe to help initially frame the conditions, after that its grey matter. As Ken pointed out - almost any diagram can be used to justify a position for various reasons.

As Ken noted its an odd thread, but its representative of the type of discussion that are being worked through as the IA comes to a "more" common understanding of security challenges and how to address them.

Best, Rob