Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
I would add the context of,

  • When a populace conspires to use military or violent means against its own governance it is insurgency.
  • When that governance acts militarily to prevent or put down such an uprising it is COIN.
  • When an external government uses military force (or now, non-state actor like AQ) to support an insurgency it is Unconventional Warfare.
  • When an external government seeks to assist a government the prevention or putting down of an insurgency, by military means, it is Foreign Internal Defense.
That is one way of defining it to be sure, and you are not alone. Personally I find it much easier to grasp the true dynamics at work, and therefore the true solutions required to the problem, by looking at the military aspect as not some separate event, but as a capability that is brought into a much larger event when it rises to a level that the civil government can not handle by itself.

Phased in as needed, phased out as not needed. Sometimes bringing warfighting capabilities, and other times bringing the vast civil capabilities inherent in the manpower, training, organization, and equipment capacity that the military has on hand and uncommitted when not warfighting. Civil capacity is by designed pretty much maxed out. The governmental "reserve" is really its active military force first for overseas engagement, and reserve component military force for domestic engagement.

To look at insurgency and its many related missions as "military operations focused on defeating the threat" does two very dangerous things in my mind:

1. It focuses a solution on a symptom of a problem vs the causes of the problem.

2. It lets the Civil government off the hook for their failure that brought us here in the first place.

By looking at support to a foreign country's insurgency as "COIN" does one very dangerous thing: It causes you to look at their war as your war, and then you beging to take over, and then your very presence expands the insurgency by adding a "resistance" component to the "revolutionary" or "separatist" movement you came to help with. By keeping our intervention in the context of FID, we can focus on repairing the breach between the failed government and the revolting populace.