Quote Originally Posted by Bill Moore View Post
We should continue to identify the signs of an emergent problem and encourage others to take appropriate steps to prevent it, but I think it isn't realistic to weight our (the military's) efforts here, since most countries won't ask for help until it is too late.

Good post, definitely food for thought.

What do you think we can or should do better in the area of prevention?

Do we have the forces available to do it?
Two points:
(1) The final question above indicates the wrong mindset. I not so humbly submit that prevention (action during BW's Phase 0) is not a military option; it does not require "forces." One's military may be used for things like civil works projects (the kind of stuff the Corps of Engineers does for example) but not for doing warfighting or policing type activities.
(2) Prevention outside of one's own sovereitgn land is not possible. Trying to stop an insurgency elsewhere is an example of the "leading a horse to water" problem. As noted by others in this thread, the host nation has to see that the nascent problem exists and desire to do something about it. The only thing outsiders can really do is to keep identifying that, as Marcellus said in Hamlet (Act I, Sc 4), "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."

An aside:
I just started reading The Wars of German Unification (Modern Wars), by Dennis Showalter, published in 2004. In the first chapter, he discusses the period around 1848, describing, among other things, the work done by the armies of Prussia, Austria and the various Germanic principalities in counter-insurgency (he actually uses that term). He notes how poorly they did at it and how blind the various Germanic states were to the causes of the insurrections. He also briefly discusses the debate in Prussian military circles about the value for officers of an academic preparation/study in the art of war .

The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.