Organizing for COIN at the Company and Platoon Level

[Rex Brynen]

Good units don't do dumb stuff. That simple. There will always be an occasional soul that wants to be abusive or stupid; if it isn't tolerated, his fellow Troops will stop him before it even becomes an NCO issue.

This holds true, of course, when the unit command views abuse towards the local population as undesirable--as opposed to a situation where it is considered or accepted part of a general strategy of intimidation, and encouraged.

A friend of mine, who served as an IDF paratrooper in the late 1980s, once noted that in this sense there were very different ROEs in the West Bank and in Lebanon. In the former, there were both formal and informal constraints on brutal behaviour. In the latter (pre-withdrawal), a much higher level of intimidation was standard procedure, even among the elite and highly disciplined units (not everyone plays by FM 3-24 rules).