Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
That's not what I take from CvC. The destruction of the enemies forces has political effect on the other elements of the trinity - Leadership and people. All useful military acts have political effect at some level and for some duration. In fact I would submit that is how you judge the usefulness of military action, and I think CvC makes this point.

An insurgency exactly mirrors CvC's trinity. If it doesn't it's not an insurgency. Destroying the military capability of an insurgency, is one way to defeat the insurgency. - and this alwasy makes me wonder why all the great and good are trying to examine insurgencies as some kind of exclusive case, instead of starting from the premise that COIN is warfare, and not "social work with guns," or some other post-modern take on a very ancient problem.

While I will certainly agree, and history supports, that the defeat of the insurgent's military capacity within ones populace will effectively suppress an insurgency, often for years. But it has not to my knowledge ever truly resolved an insurgency. So long as the conditions giving rise to insurgency exist, the insurgency will re-emerge. It may come back with new leaders, or a new ideology, but it will come back.

Make defeat of the insurgent a supporting effort, but do so while understanding that he is a part of the same populace who's support you are trying to regain as the counterinsurgent and tailor your defeat mechanisms accordingly. The main effort must be upon reestablishing conditions of good governance with the populace writ large. This is not social work with guns, but simply a recognition that when governance fails, it often has to use force in its efforts to re-establish itself with the populace.

To hold that one size fits all, that the solutions that one seeks with ones own popualce are the same that one seeks with a competing state is a concept that I have not seen any convincing arguments made to support. Frankly, I suspect CvC would scratch his head at the concept as well.