This thread made me think about an Armor officer buddy of mine who remarked as he was reading "The Sling and the Stone", that he thought COIN was much harder then HIC - if you guys remember prior to that some of the high level thinking was that if you could do HIC well, the rest would follow.

Imagine though, if you were under the other premise, and your organization and doctrine, your training and acquisition priorities were similarly associated. How different would we have looked? Take it one step further and consider if threat was a Joint outlook?

We often take for granted why we are what we are because our concern for the present and immediate future alters the context of the decisions made in the past - this is the curse of the fortune teller I guess.

It was pointed out to me that the Army is often asked why it requires so much of a LOG tail when other services and allies do not. We (the Army) campaign - we come and we stay, and although we desire certain expeditionary capabilities, our ability to sustain a difficult and enduring land campaign is something that nobody else does like us. The Joint Force (and this is not to deny they have their own sustainment/LOG capabilities, or provide the means to bring it in and take it out) and allied forces heavily rely on US Army Logistics when campaigning on land - much of their (our Joint and allied) capability truly is expeditionary, and as such is built to get there quickly, but not necessarily to support an enduring campaign. I am still not entirely comfortable with including "campaign quality" and "expeditionary capabilities" in the same sentence -but it reflects the realities of today's requirements to remain "ready and relevant"

I'm not sure where the mean of pendulum should be. I know that if you have always had something, you tend to take it for granted, and its hard to conceive of the work that was required to build it to that point, or how seemingly minor changes can have secondary and tertiary consequences, or the work that would be required to fix it. Fortunately we are evolutionary, so I think we will find the right balance over time. We must be able to do it all, because within a major COIN campaign today there is likely to be times when the enemy will use very lethal, portable and available firepower to challenge us on his terms, and there is the also the very real possibility that we will be asked to destroy another's conventional means of making War.

Best Regards, Rob