Bill,

An excellent question; and one we probably won't like the answer to.

I don't remember a lot of details from my time as a Cadet in ROTC, but do remember with crystal clarity a conversation with our SF MSG at our detatchment. He had been an E-5 on an ODA in Vietnam and was telling us about a patrol he was on with a Vietnamese unit, and said something about putting them out front to lead the way to where they expected to make contact with the enemy. I asked why he didn't lead? (after all, we were there to learn about leadership) He looked me in the eye, with a look (and message)I will never forget, and said, "last time I checked, it was their war."

This is one of my primary reasons for harping on what may seem like an unimportant nuance to many that what one does during an intervention to support the COIN efforts of some partner is not COIN, but is FID. If I think I'm doing the same mission as the Host Nation, it is a pretty easy transition to forgeting whose war it is and getting into inappropriate roles that may be more effective in the short term, but that are incredibly damaging to achieving the longer term effects of a legitimate, competent security force supporting a government dedicated to the service of its entire populace.

Instead, we end up enabling poor governance, which makes the conditions of insurgency worse, and then in turn demands we poor in more and more resouces and units to deal with the growing insurgency.

in FID, less is more. If you make it big, it will get big. COIN tactics derived from colonial efforts didn't much worry about this. Stripping off that colonial perspective and allowing the host nation to sink or swim is hard.

Besides, sometimes the insurgent is right and the government is wrong; when we force a victory by the wrong side we may serve our interests in the near term, but the long term costs of such forced solutions selected, shaped, and executed by outsiders are coming at a growing cost in the current info tech environment.