However despite these points,Originally Posted by William F. Owen
Couldn't it obviously be agreed on though that some progress within the COIN debate, has been made in terms of addressing the three issues that you just mentioned and that been alluded to earlier?
Progress has certainly been made. Even the stupidest pig finds a truffle!
However we are still living under the influence of some less than stellar thinking.
Infinity Journal "I don't care if this works in practice. I want to see it work in theory!"
- The job of the British Army out here is to kill or capture Communist Terrorists in Malaya.
- If we can double the ratio of kills per contact, we will soon put an end to the shooting in Malaya.
Sir Gerald Templer, foreword to the "Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya," 1958 Edition
And that comes from all quarters (to include the military).Progress has certainly been made. Even the stupidest pig finds a truffle!
However we are still living under the influence of some less than stellar thinking.
Degrees these days are box-checks, and may not be what they were fifty years ago. And military training has had issues in the United States for the entire existence of the nation. Put the two together, and you have issues.
The whole COIN issue, to me, should be "are we going to actually preserve what we learned this time?" instead of "is Iraq like the Philippines/Vietnam/Malaya". And I don't have much faith in the U.S. military retaining anything of value, since it's failed to do so in every other conflict of this nature that it's been involved in.
"On the plains and mountains of the American West, the United States Army had once learned everything there was to learn about hit-and-run tactics and guerrilla warfare."
T.R. Fehrenbach This Kind of War
You can, as you did with WW2 IF someone bothers to codify the lessons into an understanding and practice of Irregular Warfare. COIN is a form Warfare, beyond anything else. It IS about breaking will. It needs to be considered in those terms and the lessons will endure.
Infinity Journal "I don't care if this works in practice. I want to see it work in theory!"
- The job of the British Army out here is to kill or capture Communist Terrorists in Malaya.
- If we can double the ratio of kills per contact, we will soon put an end to the shooting in Malaya.
Sir Gerald Templer, foreword to the "Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya," 1958 Edition
You appear to have more faith in the system than I do, which may be a good thing. I think the last serious effort to do this was the USMC Small Wars Manual.
"On the plains and mountains of the American West, the United States Army had once learned everything there was to learn about hit-and-run tactics and guerrilla warfare."
T.R. Fehrenbach This Kind of War
The problem with trying to codify the lessons of past experience, of course, is that every case is different and what works in one may not work in another. A manual - even a very good one - makes an excellent servant and a terrible master. It's all too easy to cast them in the latter role.
Somewhere between trying to fight yesterday's war and relearning everything from scratch there is probably a wise middle ground, but I don't know that we'll ever find it.
The Owen/Jones debate - break the will of the insurgent vs remove the root cause of the insurgency - will always be with us and probably always should be: both sides have an important piece of the puzzle. The balance between the two that any given situation requires will have to be worked out on a case to case basis. There is no recipe.
I'm not convinced that there's any set of tactical lessons or methods that would have made our current engagements substantially easier or more successful, because I believe that the primary errors that created the mess were at the level of policy and strategy. A better field manual might have helped in a few cases and a few places, but I can't see it changing the overall picture.
I also don't see the "lessons of late 19th/early 20th century asymmetric warfare" being a game-changer. Certainly it was much easier for light-skinned people to whip dark-skinned people into submission then than it is now: that's why Portugal can no longer run Brazil, Belgium can no longer run the Congo, England can no longer run India. These things have not become impossible because we have lost some knowledge or capacity that our ancestors had, they've become impossible because the world today is a very different place. Our problem isn't that we have failed to learn the lessons of history, but that the other folks have succeeded in learning the lessons of history. The things we did back then are not going to work today, it's time to adjust to the real world before us.
Last edited by Dayuhan; 06-26-2010 at 02:27 AM.
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