Modernization Theory is Hokum.

[Madhu]

But governments do it all the time. They do it through inoculation programs that skew the population density. They do it through the tax code that favors married couples or by deciding who can marry who. They do it through any number of rules that regulate your life "for the better". They don't call it social engineering, but the result is the same.

So is the social engineering the Army is directed to do just "the continuation of policy by other means"?

Isn't it our policy to spread democracy?

If it is, isn't it our job to mold the population of our target country/population; to till the soil so that it can accept the seeds of representative government?

While I don't like it, I am not sure I can make a cogent argument against it.

http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ad.php?t=15993

I think you had some nice comments too?

Molding populations on the behalf of the other is a fool's errand, and, no, the military is not always instructed to do this. For instance, the President wanted options that would allow him to draw down in Afghanistan and focus on CT but the Army didn't want to do that.

Even within the "spread democracy" examples the military got off track on theories like RMA which didn't leave enough troops for post conflict stabilization.

How this turned into a conversation about the military building schools as its primary operation or tactical or whatever focus is beyond me.

See, I shouldn't comment because it's too time consuming

PS: Supporting the formation of a government is not synonymous with molding populations. Not everything is population-centric in this sense.

Policy changes from administration to administration and according to national mood, so any operational focus on molding populations is doomed to failure. The military has an obligation to make the true costs of this fool's errand known to its civilian oversears which did not always happen in the examples of Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq.

How did such collossal intellectual confusion make its way into our collective national security complex psyche?