The author effectively addresses several serious flaws in our operational and tactical strategy, and he proposes a daring course of action.

After reading the article, it trigger the following thoughts:

1. Our military is still overly focused on Force Protection, and it limits our ability to take the fight to the enemy effectively. This is a case where political considerations (casualty rates) have once again won over the correct tactical employment of our forces to win this type of war.

2. His high risk proposal of deploying numerous small units to saturate an area is classic, but unforunately too daring for our military. I have to disagree with one of his points though, he said said the terrorists wouldn't know where we're at, they would just know that we could be everywhere (paraphrasing), so their freedom of movement would be severely limited. U.S. military forces in an urban environment for he most part would still be identified by the locals, and that information could be relayed to the enemy by suportive locals. This tactic is still sound, but we can't assume invisibility in an urban environment. Another option to expand upon his concept to develop local forces that are capable of using this strategy.

3. We're overly focused on the IED and IED cell/network. We're spending billions of dollars to protect ourselves from this threat as he pointed out, yet in doing so we are in many ways making the IED more effective. Sometimes I see parallels in our response to the IED problem to our response to the German submarine threat during WWII. The submarine threat was a much greater strategic threat than the IED, and there was considerable effort put forth to develop technologies to mitigate this threat. It was an appropriate effort in this case. Developing new armors, jamers, etc. to counter IEDs should be pursued in a similiar effort, but it shouldn't be the main effort.

If we put half that effort into defeating the insurgency, instead of the IED we would have a much greater impact on reducing IED attacks (as noted in the relatively secure areas). It seems to me we're looking at the IED as though this something completely new, yet it has been around forever. We used to call them booby traps and mechanical ambushes. We developed tactics to pacify an area, thus we defeated this threat by defeatng the enemy, not their tactic. Now we seem to be focused entirely on the IED and the cell that emplaces it.

Great article.