Hi kehenry1,

Quote Originally Posted by kehenry1 View Post
marct...I know what you're getting at and yes "combat" or "violence" is part of social interaction and thus, can be construed as "political". and, yes, Clausewitz at once makes combat and politics the same while simultaneously making them separate. Probably what confuses people.
Probably. I suspect that he looked at it as a change in frequency distribution over time given his use of metaphors and analogs from Newtonian physics. If we take a sliding scale, from "Politics" (defined as non-kinetic human interaction) to "War" (defined as kinetic human interaction), that would make sense.

Quote Originally Posted by kehenry1 View Post
however, I think the issue here is separating "violence" from other tactics in order to re-enforce the idea among the "combat oriented" forces that the "other tactics", ie "politics" or "non-violent", are available and should be used equally or more often to defeat an insurgency.
Agreed - it's one of the reasons why I brought up the issue of defining politics. Hearkening back to that formal-informal distinction, I think we can also look at the range of actions defined as "acceptable" in a formal setting (either through mutual agreement, e.g. the Laws of War or via mutual acceptance without formal agreement, e.g. "collateral damage") vs. those that are not "acceptable" in a formal setting (e.g. non-state actors engaging in "warfare", terrorist tactics, etc.). Again, I would suggest that we are seeing a change over time in the membership function of any given action/event being included in a given term.

One of the reasons why I "pick on" Gian's comments so much (apologies for that - it's not personal at all and I'll be more than happy to buy the first round if/when we can get some f2f time ), is that his stated views are an almost perfect example of someone who believes that certain terms are absolute and unchanging. I really don't think this is a case of someone "getting it" or not - just a great illustration of how the human mind operates. You may be right about the separation of violent from non-violent tactics, although I would argue that this is now into the realm of communicating the concept of appropriate tactics for the given environment.