Not sure if anyone had seen this. Written by a very good friend of mine that I served with in Iraq and Fort Campbell.


Lies, damned lies and counterinsurgency
Not all insurgencies have been protracted affairs
BY CAPT. ROBERT M. CHAMBERLAIN

It has become a matter of conventional wisdom that insurgencies last an average of 10 years and that the insurgents win about 40 percent of the time. These statistics have appeared in USA Today, PBS, Pentagon media briefings and on National Public Radio. The insight these numbers are meant to convey is that counterinsurgencies are inherently long and difficult struggles against wily and resilient foes, so it is unrealistic to expect rapid, quantifiable progress in the near term. Fortunately, these statistics are misleading and the associated analysis is wrong.

The source of this mistaken conventional wisdom is the prestigious Dupuy Institute, which has been providing rigorous quantitative analysis to the military for more than 40 years. In May 2007, Dupuy researchers published the preliminary results of a study in which they examined 63 modern insurgencies for a variety of factors, including the longevity and the success rate of the conflicts. Given their analytical talent and track record of precision, their statistical computations are undoubtedly accurate. The problem, however, isn’t with their math; it’s with the initial selection of cases.

According to the FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency doctrine manual, an insurgency is “an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict.” In the past 100 years, there have been considerably more than 63 movements that would fit that definition, so to create a manageable data set, only the most violent and intense conflicts are likely to be included. However, because casualty counts are often a function of time, this method naturally trends toward long wars and excludes cases in which government forces crushed the nascent insurgency before it even got off the ground.
http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2008/05/3434645