Quote Originally Posted by Gian P Gentile View Post
Your response suggests to me that there are conditions that the United States simply can not change with military force even when supported by the best doctrine and competent outfits. It also suggests agreement with Doug Macgregor in another thread that in the greater scheme of things the Surge really hasn’t accomplished much. If the fundamental political conditions have not been resolved then the Surge at best has done what you say and only staved off disaster until the end of this Administration.

This is why I have pushed the term Civil War in Iraq as a way to understand conditions there instead of counterinsurgency. Because the country is in Civil War over fundamental political and social issues, the war will not be resolved until certain sides win out through fighting over others. That was really the point i was getting at in my Eating Soup with a Spoon piece. That American Coin doctrine has removed fighting as the reality of war and replaced it with, to use your words, "the British model" which employs scientific processes to link the people to the government, or to use a catchy Kilkullen phrase, "rewire the social environment."

To use a historical analogy such thinking sounds like the decade preceding the American Civil War where compromises were made between the north and south but since the fundamental political and social conditions had not been resolved the war came. Political leaders like Stephen Douglas believed that their cleverness with organizing territories like Kansas and Nebraska under popular sovereignty would allow these territories to develop economically, railroads to be built, etc, and that these processes would be enough to "rewire" the north to the south and stave off war. Obviously, it did not work.
I think you've accurately captured what I, in my often inept way, was trying to say. Why I take issue with the "warfighting" approach is that the United States is not willing to push that far enough to actually attain success. In effect, we DID counterinsurgency in Germany and Japan in 1945. Unless you're willing to take it THAT far, I don't think we should start down that road. After all we WON the war in Vietnam. We just lost the conflict.

What I called the "British" model--the "light handed" approach--may have a lower probability of success than the "warfighting" or heavy handed approach, but it is, for the United States, politically feasible.

I was sort of flummoxed by the "is Iraq an insurgency or a civil war?" debate last year. I view insurgency as a strategy. Every time I can think of that it has been used, it was within the context of an asymmetric civil war.