Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
Sun Tzu

Bill, you are right, of course. I am a strategist who focuses on understanding insurgency. This is what I do and it is, indeed, what I bring to the discussion. There are thousands of NCOs and junior officers with far more to offer than I in regard to nuances of tactical approaches to the fights we have placed them in. My focus has been, and will remain, seeking to ensure that when us old guys put them into such a fight, it is in a time, manner and place designed to contribute to solving the problem that led us to deploy them in the first place.

What I am suggesting is not an approach rooted in a combination of UW and FID, though that would certainly be the lion share of the tactical supporting actions. What I am suggesting is that we are currently applying a military solution to attack/defeat the symptoms of problems rooted in foreign policy.

As I have pointed out before, FM 3-24 takes a fork in the road in the very first sentence of the first paragraph of the first Chapter: "Insurgency and Counterinsurgency (COIN) are complex subsets of warfare." At that point we have committed ourselves to a military solution and just granted the Policy/Governance community a pass.

I would make this the first thing to change in the re-write of this manual. Insurgency and Counterinsurgency (COIN) are complex subsets of governance."