Quote Originally Posted by Red Rat View Post
I am inclined to agree with Wilf on this.

Civil Government deals with the root causes of an insurgency, the politics, grievances, governance, resource issues et al.

The security forces deal with the symptoms of insurgency - the armed groups.

Both must happen in concert and neither by itself will be successful in the long term.

The problem we have at the moment is that the inability of the wider government to deal with the wider issues has lead to the military taking more of a role in these, which has diffused military effort and clouded (not to say confused) military thinking.
Yes, and at the central level the input of the various players is managed.

For your key military units they need to kill and kill effectively with perhaps some "rules" as to how civilians are dealt with.

Then you have the "civil ops" people who do their bit, maybe not even armed.

As I have said before I see no need for using your elite units to hand out sweeties and footballs.