Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
Ah... but... you see ... um... actually I don't think there is COIN v Conventional.

There are combat and security operations against regular and irregular threats and you might have to conduct combat and security operations against regular and irregular threats at the same time. Counter-insurgency could be an entirely false construct, and a misleading one as well.
I agree. It is a false construct. My point was simply that many have a tendency to see a "type" (for lack of a better word) of combat and to name it. We fight in urban terrain and call it MOUT. We fight in mountains and call it Mountain Warfare. The name is just something that we throw around because it is combat occuring under conditions where we tend to use more of some techniques and procedures and fewer of others. The doctrine and tactics apply equally to both. People see the type of war that we're fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and call it COIN. No problem - MOUT, COIN, Mountain, Desert, Woodland - whatever. Last I checked, we still use movement formations to ensure security, control, and flexibility, whether operating in Iraq, Afghanistan, or the Balkans. It looks different in each - technique - but that's it. Whether entering rooms in Bosnia or Iraq, we took up points of domination, but it looked a lot different than in Iraq, in terms speed and posture. We altered formations according to the perceived enemy situation. It's all the same doctrine. In Iraq, we modified our techniques and procedures for theater-specific threats.

I think OIF was a wakeup call for a lot of people who finally realized that our practice of training for CTC's, rather than training for war, led us to be a military only prepared for a very narrow range of enemies and a very narrow range of conditions. Some responded by writing another doctrinal publication. I think that really appealed to the cerebral crowd that enjoys the intellectual exercise of discussing big picture issues and putting it down on paper. The end-product was not useless. It was very effective upon the political and domestic target audiences. It sent a message that we were unprepared as a military, but were learning and getting our act together. The means by which we actuallly, on the ground, got our act together had little, perhaps nothing, to do with a doctrine re-write. Rather, it was a lot of squads, platoons, and companies figuring out how to apply knowledge that they already had. We finally realized, as an institution, that our training up until that point had been garbage - not because we weren't taught the basics, but because our training never emphasized teaching leaders and Soldiers how to apply their knowledge to a wider range of conditions, how to think more creatively, be more adaptive, and be more flexible. Our training pre-OIF was characterized more by a canned training scenario whereby if the BLUEFOR did not behave as the OC expected, then the situation would deteriorate at a speed, and on a scale, that was so absurd as to remove all training value from the exercise. If the BLUEFOR did behave as the OC expected, then there were no surpises and the commander got kudos in the AAR for being completely predictable and by the book. OIF turned into the worthwhile training exercise that we never had. After a few years, we finally became an adequately trained force.