Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
Leaving the Luftwaffe out as an irrelevancy, the answer to your statement is that you have to weed them out with good intel; thus your strategy is not defeated; your job is simply made a lot harder harder and it will take longer.
The best intel to weed out the bad guys comes from the people in the village or the neighborhood. They are not likely provide intel if they are pissed off at having been dissed by troops, had their fields ruined by a tank or having some of their relatives, friends and neighbors, near or distant, killed or maimed by an airstrike. Another disadvantage of the above listed events is their excitable teenage sons might go off and join a war band to get some revenge.

The advantage of COINdinistada is that it tends to highlight the disadvantages of making the locals mad at you.

It seems to me that part of what this discussion is all about is how you kill the ones who need to be done away with when the miscreants are near or among the people. Do you get them mostly with rifles and try to eschew air strikes, which I imagine can complicate things and will almost certainly result in more friendly casualties; or do you use the heavy weapons more, even thought that will most likely (given the recent history in Afghan, certainly) increase casualties amongst the locals?