Of course, negotiating those limits and the conventions would be a freakin' nightmare .
You know Marc, the other day I got asked to brief a foreign attaché on JCISFA. There was a set of slides to go over as a kind of info brief. The most wonderful thing happened - technical difficulties arose and caused a pause. The pause allowed a real, no fooling conversation to take place. In that brief time I found out he'd already gotten a similar info brief not 6 months ago. At that point we were both relieved and nixed the slides and talked about what was on his mind with regards to SFA, and many of the other subjects we've discussed in this thread and others. We probably talked for a good hour - and I believe we all got infinitely further then any set of slides could go.

So the key I think is the interaction, the discussion, the negotiation. I think up front, although terribly unpopular as it does not hold "solution" like answers that can be filed away as another win in time to hold up as one more reason to elect or re-elect. This gets to the reconciliation that both Ken and you mentioned between what you want and what you can realistically achieve (for whatever reasons), what you want and what your partners want (or believe to be more in their interests), how it plays in one place vs. somewhere else, etc. None of those things are easy because they are conditional and that means unless you are willing to roll the dice and be able to live with comes up, then you are going to have to bring appetite and stomach into balance. That our political cycle is what it is does not engender itself to that reality, but it does not stop us from perpetuating the fiction that there are easy wars either.

So we're back to the nightmare that is, and the guy who gets sent forward to do the best that he can, be he a soldier or civilian advising foreign forces or bureaucrats, or the guy getting off a Blackhawk as part of an AASLT to seize some key piece of terrain to extend the Line of Operation.

One of the things I'd mentioned early on is that I don’t consider the genesis of this thread as something novel - if anything it is an attempt to synthesize what I think we're already doing in many ways (and many have done before us), just maybe in a disconcerted manner. Putting it in the format that I did just helps me to frame the strategic and perhaps operational contexts as I contemplate where SFA fits, be it as part of BPC in an Indirect sort of way, or be it in post conflict operations following a Direct application of military power. This is one of the reasons why the SFA slide showing breadth and depth in an attempt to consider its scope was upfront.

I think of the two approaches (Direct and Indirect) as complementary. Indirect, for many of the reasons Ken mentioned and I think I brought up early on is hard, and from a military standpoint (if not a political one), somewhat contrary to our nature. However, I also believe we have to have an indirect component to fight a long war, particularly one in which just access can be so critical to be able to be direct at times and places more (not completely) on our terms. We could quickly exhaust ourselves in terms of domestic will, international political capital, and military means by trying to unilaterally pursue a direct approach. The other thing about framing it into direct and indirect components is it helped me consider where the broader inter-agency, multi-national partners, IOs and maybe even NGOs might work together to better achieve (or achieve out right) what military power may not be able to accomplish in and of itself. To me its about better positioning ourselves to take advantage of things as they are vs. how we’d like them to be, then when we realize they are not so, we reach for military power applied in a direct manner, because that is the only element we developed, and the only manner we have time for.

As stated over and over, t’aint easy.
Best, Rob