So, if a military commander is given a mission, consisting of task, purpose and commander's intent to go to a foreign land to lead a coalition effort to help resolve an insurgency, he is limited to only violent approaches to addressing the insurgent organizations; or he is somehow muddling in "policy" if, as the only expert in COIN sitting around the Cabinet table he says:
"Mr. President, our initial assessment is that the current government lacks legitimacy in the eyes of their own populace, and our intervention will not only exacerbate that condition; but because of it we will likely end up in a campaign that could take years rather than months. Also, we need to consider that we are presumably looking at this intervention as a way of reducing the risk to the United States of Terrorist attacks, but because of the same legitimacy concerns that make COIN success unlikely, this intervention is likely to cause the insurgency to direct a portion of their effort to attacks designed to break our support to the government. We should not expect those efforts to be limited to being against our combat forces in country, but could well be against civilian targets anywhere in the world.
Finally, while I fully appreciate that your predecessor handed you a "war against terrorism" as you came into office, and I have been dutifully waging that war to the best of my ability; my Special Forces strategists have pointed out that what AQ is really doing is waging a very sophisticated campaign of unconventional warfare to leverage active and latent insurgent movements in populaces across the Middle East. Getting mired too deeply in any one of those insurgencies lends a lot of credence to AQ's sales pitch, and will distract thinking, resources and effort from where they really need to be applied. Our professional military opinion is that the best application of the military is to conduct CT directly against the core of AQ leadership and toward the disruption of critical nodes of the network they employ as a non-state entity to wage this UW campaign. Coupled with this we need to conduct a holistic analysis of each of the states where the majority of foreign fighters come from, where terrorists hail from, and where we see these AQ nodes operating to conduct UW. We then need to develop a comprehensive campaign plan that addresses everything from policy, to governance, military capacity that is focused not on the presumption of maintaining any particular government in power, and not on the defeat of any particular nationalist insurgent movement, no matter how in bed with AQ they are. It must be focused on bringing the parties together and enabling a more effective dialog between the parties, while at the same time disempowering AQ in their efforts to leverage these distinct movements to their larger purpose."
"Thank you general, that makes a tremendous amount of intuitive sense, and aligns very well with the published positions of my administration for how I wish to engage the world in general, and this challenging problem in particular. Why is it just now that the Pentagon is bringing me this course of action?"
"Well, sir to be fair, this is new for all of us, and DoD focus is on deterrence and defeat of military foes. We've had to make a lot of changes to adjust to this new mission and are proud of the flexibility that we have demonstrated as an organization and the efforts we have made to attempt to address this problem over the past 9 years. But our natural tendency to be careful to avoid what might be considered as policy by some has blinded us from fully considering every aspects of a problem that extends well beyond the simple military defeat of those who take up arms against us and our allies. We're working through that though and felt that it was important that we tried to lay out the big picture for you. As always, we stand ready to execute to the best of our ability any mission you hand us, and I can have the first significant push of SOF forces on the ground in 48 hours, with the elements of three BCTs beginning to flow in 24 hours after that. Air, Space, and Naval forces are repositioning as we speak."
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