Bill wrote:
I think we're grossly over reacting to the situation in Iraq, which is a situation of our own making due to poor planning and faulty assumptions. That sure as heck doesn't mean it is the future of warfare, unless we're incapable of learning.

The fix in this case isn't more combat advisors, but an appropriate strategy. I can think of very few situations where U.S. advisors were decisive (nor should they be), and the most effective U.S. advisors in true COIN scenarios (not armed nation building like we're doing Iraq and Afghanistan) [emph. added] have normally been very, very few in number (Lansdale in the Philippines, a hand full of advisors in Greece, etc.).
120mm wrote:
I see the merits in both arguments. COIN is here to stay, and it will do the Army no good whatsoever to ignore its existence yet again. However, the purely kinetic fight is the best use of the military. DoD needs to get out of the business of being our primary instrument of foreign affairs.

What we need is to amp up and rebuild (build?) our non-military elements of national power, and if it becomes necessary to intervene globally, to do so using those elements first, and reserving the military for the actual and appropriate violence as an end to policy and to bail our butts out when we inevitably screw up.
Ken wrote:
I also disagree on strategic grounds. Why does everyone assume we must be involved in FID and / or COIN. I do not question that we may be and should be prepared to do so but I strongly disagree that we should seek that mission -- and I assure you based on 45 years of doing and 15 more watching this stuff if you create an Advisor Corps it will get used.

My point is that there are better ways to handle many situations than to go barging in to 'fix' it -- our track record at that is not stellar and mayhap we should just stop digging and pursue alternative strategies.

I disagree on Operational grounds; commitment to another nation for FID or a COIN effort effectively constitute the operational level of war -- thus by default, DoD will take over the effort and we'll get to again do something that neither out national psyche nor our form and model of government is prepared to sustain.
This is a really brilliant thread. I doubt I can add much to the excellent conversation above, but there is one thing that I'd like to draw to your attention and see if it makes sense to you. My reading of this debate leads me to wonder whether the difference between the two sides really comes down to how they see the Long War playing out in the near to medium future.

If the Bush administration was right to argue that the main threats to US security will come from "failed" and "failing states", then I believe it makes sense to allocate risk accordingly and reduce investment in the procurement of advanced platforms to pay for increasing the number of troops. (I referred here particularly to the money issue as I believe that's the big issue where there WILL have to be tradeoffs; in areas like education and training, I agree with the others who argued for a flexible training program that would create a force more capable of operating across the full spectrum, and I don't believe there is as much a zero-sum game as in allocating fiscal resources). So, IF fixing (or at least improving, or preventing from collapse) weak states in important strategic places will become a common mission, then I think the military will continue to be assigned these tasks because no one else in the government has the resources to do it at least in the short-to-medium term.

I think most people on the other side of the debate doubt most of the assertions from the previous paragraph. Maybe, as Andy Bacevich wrote, they really disagree with the whole strategic framework in which the administration put the "war on terror", or maybe the just disagree with the realism of the proposed responses offered by the administration. However, I don't agree with his implication that this is really a strategy debate that ultimately belongs to the civilian leaders. If strategic planning is about matching means with ends, it follows that both civilian and military leaders ought to have input on both ends of planning. Hopefully the next administration will understand this better than the current one did during Rumsfeld.

I think it's hard to disagree that the US military needs to conduct Full Spectrum Operations. Having said that, it often seems to me that the "spectrum" of some people is way bigger than that of others. Bill makes an interesting distinction above between traditional COIN and "armed nation building". Their requirements may be an order of magnitude different, depending mainly I would imagine on the level of capacity if the local government. I'm also tempted to believe that the latter would describe more accurately what members of the administration think it may be needed in order to deny safe haven to al-Qaeda types in places like Afghanistan.