Indirect and Direct components to strategy for the Long War

[Bob's World]

As a guy who's spent a lot of time out at SOCPAC where this whole business of "direct" and "indirect approaches" latest version really developed (I believe Sun Tzu gets credit for first recorded use of the terms) I'll offer a little history and personal opinion.

The phrases "Basilan Model" and "Indirect approach" were getting thrown around in ever expanding circles as the good news story of the OEF-P began to circulate. The problem was that the real essence of what those terms meant resided primarly in the head of then MG David Fridovich who was the first JSOTF CDR and the SOCPAC commander. Everyone else was forming their own idea as to what they meant based on their own experiences elsewhere. To capture this essence in a simple form as his J5 I drafted this and he approved it:

"We are waging two campaigns, a COIN campaign that is our main effort and is based on the indirect approach; and a CT campaign that is our supporting effort and is based on the direct approach."

I later modified that to say that we were actually conducting FID, and that it was the Govt of the Philippines that was conducting COIN and CT.

Now, to SFA. SFA is primarily the direct approach.

If you are building security force capacity to go out an execute CT operations, or counterinsurgent operations, it does not somehow make it the indirect approach because you are enabling someone else to go out and execute the direct approach.

The indirect approach is so named because it focuses on addressing the environment that gives rise to the insurgency in the first place, not so named because it is executed by surrogates.

So whether you are a drain the swamps (indirect) and kill the alligators (direct) guy;

or of you are a fan of Thoreau: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil (direct approach) to one who is striking at the root (indirect approach), and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve."

or can grasp: attack the symptoms (direct), attack the causes (indirect)

you get what it is all about.

I have seen recent GCC plans that lay out efforts of building host nation security force capacity to go out and conduct COIN against the insurgent as their indirect approach effort. As I told them, "good engagement, but not the 'indirect approach'."