Yes!!! I am still thinking through Wilf's points, but I am in violent agreement with the above!
IMHO COIN is more complex then conventional operations only because from a military perspective the military is doing more of what other government departments / NGOs / other governments should be doing in conventional warfare.
In COIN we may or may not be dealing more with the Influence side - which should be done by the indigenous government (but if it was doing things right we probably wouldn't be in a COIN scenario in the first case...) Having got sucked into the Influence Activities we have specialised it, instead of subsuming it into generic G3/5/7 activities. The result? A blossoming cadre of specialists and an increasingly esoteric lexicon of terms; the one generating the other!
That is not to say that I do not think that Influence Activities are not practical, effective and necessary, I just think we have lost sight of the woods for trees
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