The gold standard is the Reid-Daly book, Pamwe Chete, or alternately titled Selous Scouts: Top Secret War. Good luck finding a copy that is affordable. I think I scored one of the last ones, from the NOVA webpage store, of all places, many years ago.
I am heartened to see the SWJ article, and to see that veterans of that conflict are taking the time to put their insights down on paper. It's sort of odd to see the JRT Wood illustrations though. I browsed the article and went straight to the core arguments of application, so I wonder if they give credit, as I did not see that cited in the body of their article. There is a link to the JRT Wood page here: http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...0&postcount=68
There are a great number of limitations that would make it difficult to translate the Fire Force of old into an effective counter-insurgent force for Afghanistan. Part of the problem is simple fact of training. We didn't fight that way before the Long War began (though I certainly advocated it some while ago), and trying to adapt to these tactics would require paradigm shifts of enormous proportion.that the Army and Marine Corps just simple cannot make these days.
I think it's a bit off course to reference holding rural territory in the title of article. The Rhodesian Security Forces in the form of the Scouts/RLI/RAR were not holding territory as much as they were interdicting the infiltration of the terr gangs coming from across the border. Once they got far enough, the difficulties of countering and killing them became magnified by a significant factor. For some reason, I remember a reference or statement somewhere that it became 4x harder to make kills once the gang had made it to certain regions of the TTLs.
Insurgent mobility is widely different between gangs of ZIPRA/ZANLA coming across the borders, and how Afghan insurgents move and operate, so that has to be considered as well.
Pseudo operations factor in sanctuary/area denial for sure, if applied the right way, but I don't think enough people recognize the juice being worth the squeeze in the current operating environment.
Anyway, find the Reid-Daly book before you go any further.
ETA-I just went back to the Rhodesian COIN thread and read all 12 pages, including a number of the linked documents and referring links. Man...good sh*t throughout that thread.
Haha...I realized that I'm about as good as a broken record. Most of my points were already posted here: http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ad.php?t=10742
At least I'm fairly consistent.
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