The Strategic Corporal

[Stratiotes]

Thanks, I appreciate the effort and I am familiar with some of those works.

My problem is this - from the ones I've read there seems to be an accepted conventional wisdom that wars will be more urban. I know a lot of the people saying that are smarter than I am for certain. But, dumb as I am I still find it difficult to accept conventional wisdom when I have not seen the raw data to support that wisdom. Are you aware of any studies based on the raw data? I'm afraid I did not find any such data in sampling of the articles you've mentioned - only the opinions of experts who tend to accept it as a given without questioning the assertion. They may be right and I would tend to believe that they being smarter than myself are right - I just haven't been convinced from their opinions alone. I'd like to see the same data they are looking at. From what I have seen, I do not see a trend evolving there. I see some evidence of the contrary, as I said.

What I would hope to find one day is somebody who did the analysis to come up with some numbers like:

1960 - There were 1300 rural COIN ops and 500 urban
1961 - 1400 rural and 800 urban
:
:
1990 - 700 rural and 1000 urban
:
:
2005 - 300 rural and 1400 urban

If I saw something like that, then I could see for myself that there did seem to be a trend toward one more than the other. So far, I haven't seen any such analysis. What I have seen so far is the opinion of "experts" and however highly I value that expert, it is still just an opinion without supporting data and therefore somewhat suspect.

[GorTex6]

The future warrior should be tactically mobile, morally responsible, lightly equipped, culturally-centric, witty, and capable of making a sound decision without a technological cloak for micromanagement.