Quote:
Originally Posted by jcustis
Really?...And so you can say authoritatively that the book they wrote was wrong?

No, you are making a prediction about the future. I said that the institution which produced it had not won a counter-insurgency (within the parameters I gave). That's a statement about the past.
If we could steer this back into the realm of your original comment about COIN manuals and losers for a moment, your statement about the past is still WRONG.

You blew in here again and made a sensational statement, then returned to wordsmithing, so please humor me for a moment as I do not know what you are trying to say.

Are you negating the socio-economic, internal political, and information operations (at a national policy level) effects that factor heavily into lost COIN efforts? That seems to be the thrust of what you are saying when you literally discount COIN manuals as somehow unecessary because the "institutions that wrote them" did not win.

Just what institutions are you talking about?

Why the need to make a sensational statement if all you really meant to say that Iraq is getting worse, or that we need to take actions which represent a drastic departure from the current course?

There seems to be a fixation with the tools used to prosecute COIN and say they are useless, yet you are not recognizing the vast number of other influencing factors that impact on this complex environment. National public will comes to mind above all else, so what does the manual have to do with this?

You also never countered Steve's post regarding your errors in post #169. Kudos that his post #171 fits your views, but do you have any comment on #169? Inquiring minds want to know, and I couldn't stop myself from asking.