I am getting more and more confused by the way people use various terms and concepts in this "conventional vs. COIN" debate. I'll use the above post just as an example, not because it is any better or worse than others in similar vain.

Quote Originally Posted by Bill Moore View Post

While we obviously want to play to our strengths, the very nature of so called "asymmetric warfare" is that a thinking enemy will play to our weaknesses, not our strengths.
If that's the "nature" of assymetric warfare, all wars against thinking enemies are assymetric, which actually is close to being true in the sense that wars are "duels" where one tries to take advantage of the enemy's weak points.
"Assymetric" or "irregular" are terms which only have meaning when contrasted to something else - i.e. the symmetric (or regular), warfare. Unless someone also provides a definition of how exactly "regular warfare" looks like in today's day and age, then talk of assymetric to me simply seems to say that the other guys fight differently than we would want them to. Fine. But I don't see how this is particularly enlightening for the debate.

Going back to the war is war comments (I don't agree), the way to win a war is to control the terrain, and in this type of war the terrain is the population. There are different ways to control a population, but we're not going to use all out terror for obvious reasons, so our response must be "COIN like".
Winning a war is accomplishing your political objectives. Period.

Sometimes, those objectives require controlling enemy territory, sometimes require control of the population, sometimes neither. It all depends on the extent of your objectives in that particular conflict.

And "war is war" doesn't seem to me like a statement that's open to debate,
if only because one would probably commit a logical fallacy by denying it. More substantively, I suspect that you mean that there are such large differences between "conventional" and "COIN-like" conflicts that these two missions need to be treated in largely distinct manners. This is debatable, and I think there are already enough arguments on this thread one way or the other.

Here is my hypothesis: to win a war we have to control the terrain (the Air Force may disagree, but they can post their counter arguments here). In this conflict the terrain is the population; therefore if we're going to win we have to conduct COIN like operations to control the population.
This is definitely a real war, and one that is as important to our national security as the Cold War was.

Terms like "Small War", COIN, stability operations, etc., can be misleading in the case of GWOT (or the Long War), because these terms imply we're helping allies, or have limited objectives, and perhaps we have the option of saying it isn't worth staying in the fight.
Which population? And what exactly do you mean by "control"? I don't mean to sound flippant, but unless you are precise about what you have in mind when applying the war terminology to the "War on Terror", as you do in the next paragraph, I cannot make an intelligent appraisal of your arguments. I can understand applying COIN models to specific cases like Iraq and Afghanistan; but when you talk about the war on terror as the equivalent of the Cold War in size and scope, I'm at a loss in comprehending what "controlling the population" looks like in that context and how exactly is the US military going to achieve that.

Contrary to what you write, I believe almost everyone would agree that one of the most effective ways of defeating Salafist terrorism is by helping local allies address local threats on their own. And that we do have limited objectives in this conflict, just like in most conflicts. How would "unlimited" objectives look anyway in the current situation? I don't see how your next statement ("perhaps we have the option of saying it isn't worth staying in the fight") follows from the previous two.

T We don't have the option of withdrawing from this fight, so instead of arguing over the fact that we're losing some of our ability to fight a peer competitor (that doesn't exist), we need to focus on how to win this critical fight we're in today. We're shaping history now, and if we don't win this fight, we may not have to worry about the peer competitor fight later.
I think it's a little bit too much of a straw-man argument to imply that people worrying about losing our ability for HIC are motivated by the desire to prepare fighting against a "peer competitor that doesn't exist" and that they would jeopardize today's missions for that reason. I believe there are a good number of potential adversaries today (Iran, NK, China in a Taiwan scenario) which could test the US military's preparedness for missions closer to HIC than we see today in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, of course, the deterrent effect from our conventional capabilities is a cornerstone of our overall national security - the more stories one gets of an overstretched military bogged down in Iraq and unable to train for some of its basic missions - the worse it must be for deterring states like Iran from causing havoc wherever they can. Having said that, there is of course a good deal of common sense in the administration's argument that nothing would be worse than a "defeated military" - I'm just saying that sometimes people tend to paint this debate too much as "good" vs. "bad" guys.

Our mission is to win our nation's wars, not to win a specific type of war.
Yes, and largely uncontroversial I believe. The real questions are more along the lines of "What are the opportunity costs that we are willing to pay for today's wars versus preparing for future ones?", or "How do we best use our current limited (and likely declining) financial resources dedicated to defense in the near future to best accomplish our overall global strategic interests for the next couple of decades?" I suspect that my answer are really closer to your's than this post might imply, but I think these issues are really worth pondering and they are clearly not as black and white as you suggested.