FID or COIN? does it matter

[Dayuhan]

The distintive line is when the level of violence exceeds the capacity of the civil governance, requiring them to bring in the military (much like our MSCA construct for all other forms of civil emergencies) as last in, first out, and always under civil control as a crucial augmentation.

Reasonable, but this does set the bar at very different levels depending on the capacity of civil governance. France, for example, can manage its periodic urban riots without military support (e.g. not insurgency) while a nation with less advanced police capabilities might have to call out troops (e.g. insurgency) for the same level of disorder. It may not be possible to establish an absolute line of demarcation that is relevant in all cases, but it's a distinction we have to be aware of. I'd say we also have to be more aware of the distinction between insurgency and armed competition for control of an ungoverned space or to fill a governance vacuum. You can't have an insurgency without a government, and calling something "a government" or "the government" doesn't necessarily make it that. If it does not or cannot govern, it's not a government, regardless of what we call it.

As to what we do when we deploy, that is like going to the neighbor's house to help him with a domestic dispute. Start thinking of it as your problem to solve, and you are in for a world of bad higher order effects. We'd never do it in our neighborhoods at home, yet we do it every time when we go to our global neighbors as a country. Problem is because we think of these things as "foreign wars" and not "foreign domestic/civil disputes."

Certainly true in some cases, less so in others. I'm not convinced that our deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan can be reasonably characterized as intervention in someone else's domestic dispute. In both cases we went in for our own reasons in pursuit of our own policies. Our intention in both cases was not to settle a domestic dispute but to re-order the "households" in a manner that suited our interests. In both cases our actions generated a dispute, but that begs the question of whether a dispute that results from outside intervention is truly domestic.