Steve,
When one is on the mat or in the ring solely trying to muscle ones way through the match failure is not far behind...you have to be able use your opponents mass to your advantage in order to win...that and a bit of ruthlessness at the appropriate moments SOF work uses this type of judo/MMA thinking in order to work with the population to achieve common objectives and defeat common opponents.
COIN warfare is population focused, and we are in a COIN match. Throughout the fight we need to understand four basic things in order to win:
1. The mass of the civilian population of Iraq and Afghanistan outmasses the opposing forces, and whomever can add the mass of the population to their side outmasses the opposition.
2. America does not have enough serving native/trained speakers of Arabic, Dari, and Pashto who have professional credentials in politics, planning, agriculture, medicine, infrastructure and who understand the cultural context of the problems and solutions intertwined in the conflict.
3. GoI and GoA have native speakers of Arabic, Dari, and Pashto who have professional credentials in politics, planning, agriculture, medicine, infrastructure and who understand the cultural context of the problems and solutions intertwined within the conflict.
4. Hunting bad guys is equally as important as stabilization operations.
My AAR of our match so far is that we are highly skilled at # 4 and need to hit the gym hard in order to work more on #’s 1-3 if we want to win.
We cannot do this alone. See # 1, # 2, and # 3.
A mixed team heavy on local actors and light on multinational advisers at the 'big table' orchestrating the plan at village, city, region/province, and country would certainly benefit from a simple and defined portfolio of national objectives agreed upon by the populace. This might be as simple as defining the following metrics:
1. W % unemployment by demographic/employment specialty sector
2. X # of security incidents/population size
3. Y kw-hours of electricity/per family/day
4. Z liters of water/per person/day
Steve
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