Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post

If you inflict military defeat on the enemy, you remove his ability to use violence as a political instrument.
You do not out-govern the enemy. You kill him." (Posted by Wilf on a different thread).
Correct. This is an immutable verity.
But how does that resolve the underlying condition that gave rise to that violence? Suppression of insurgency works, granted.
None of your business. The underlying causes of an insurgency are utterly irrelevant to you. As a US Army officer, it is absolutely above your pay grade and not your job to address these problems.- quite the opposite! You are an instrument of US Government Policy. You are not there to make the world a better place. Your job is to make the US President the most powerful man in the world, if that's what he wants.
You are their to lay the hard hand of war on who he tells you. He has other people to do the non-violent parts of diplomacy.

With some sense of irony, US Special Forces once had a de-facto mission to create violent insurgencies amongst populations who were not dissatisfied with their Government. - and they still should if that serves US policy.