Posted by Dayuhan,

You can also decide not to get involved. The first and most important step in evaluating any insurgency situation is deciding if and to what extent involvement is appropriate. Starting out with the "COIN" term in mind creates, I think, a predisposition to assume that insurgency needs to be countered. That predisposition seems to me something that we'd do well to remove, and a start might be more emphasis on understanding insurgency and less on methods of counterinsurgency.
Agree, and there are other options also.

Irregular warfare is not the "new" way, but rather a continuation of the most common form of conflict (throughout most of history). The vast majority of times we wisely (and sometimes not so wisely) choose not to get involved at all. If we decide to get involved there are multiple forms of involvement that do not involve the U.S. military directly conducting COIN. These include, but are not limited to:

1. Engage with diplomacy in hopes of reaching a diplomatic settlement

2. Provide financial assistance to the government

3. Provide military equipment with no trainers or advisors

4. Proivide intelligence support

5. Put pressure on external actors providing support to the insurgents

6. Conduct the full spectrum of FID (to include U.S. combat operations).

7. The most extreme (and the rarest) option is for the U.S. to take ownership of the problem.

If we decide to support the insurgents, there are multiple options with varying levels of support ranging from the Libya example to Nicaragua to simply providing internationl legitimacy to the insurgents.

I'm beginning to think that many of those who didn't practice or study FID/UW/COIN prior to 9/11 are viewing the world through a much too narrow spectrum of history. Of course I can't know, but I think that both OIF and OEF-A over time will be viewed as abberations in history instead of the norm. The conflict with non-state actors will continue for at least a couple more decades, but largely facilitated by special operations (small foot print operations conducted by people actually selected, trained, and organized to conduct these operations) in concert with interagency partners and of course foreign partners. GPF will provide critical support, and at times be required to conduct larger scale combat operations than SOF can conduct.

Frequently not a popular opinion on SWJ, but the era of state wars and larger non-state actor formations will require that GPF maintain their higher end major combat skills. I think it is dangerous if we continue to distract GPF from this focus after the military invested so much in SOF to get after the IW problem set. GPF will also be required for large scale stability operations like OIF, OEF-A, Bosnia, Kosovo, etc. We're all guilty of wanting to chase the shinny thing (with $$$ attached), but in general our tax payers invested over the years invested in a wide range of military capabilities to defend the U.S.. It makes little sense to evolve an organization over decades to conduct irregular warfare, and then give the mission to organizations that were largely focused on winning the fight against conventional forces. There is much SOF can't do, we can't win a fight against a conventional force (we can provide valuable support). The Army, Air Force, and Marines devastated the Iraqi military, SOF couldn't do that. The Navy secures the Persian Gulf, SOF can't do that, etc.

This is relevant to the topic, because we tend to go over board on what we think we can accomplish when we put a large GPF unit on the ground. Once the combat is over, we try to employ them in a social engineering role (or with our new doctrine, before the combat is over) and then we're surprised that this effort doesn't work.