Posted by Bob's World,
The Malaysian model of isolating the populace from the Insurgent is largely obsolete as it simply is not feasible anymore. It is also harder to simply suppress the military arm for the same reasons. Now more than ever populace-based conflict must be addressed by identifying and repairing the underlying casuation (not to be confused with the most recent motivation) for conflict.
Why is it unfeasible? Furthermore, if you think you can reduce war to a debate over ideas you're wrong. I can sit in my castle and espouse the grand values of democracy and free markets, while my opponent can espouse the values of Sharia Law, by the way my opponent is holding a knife to the neck of the audience, while we sit back and dismiss the most basic rule of COIN which is protecting the populace. If you can't protect the populace from coercive elements within the society, then you can't win. This is exactly what population centric means. Of course we're not going to completely drain the swamp, or provide 100% protection (we don't do that in the U.S.), but our set backs in Afghanistan were largely due to our inability to separate the insurgent from the populace. We made empty promises, and the insurgent delivered upon his threats. We are talking about a war, not an election.

Wilf,

What's the purpose of IW? Once again it is a forcing mechanism to expand our concept of war. Unfortunately our professional military education institutions have intentionally or unintentionally failed to address IW, and we habitually perform in a substandard manner when we are in an IW conflict. It is unexcusable that we fail to learn and apply the lessons of the past. You're right, IW is just warfare, but it a slice of the whole we are not good at. We need this concept to get past our traditional mindsets.

BW,

I think the idea of organizing our doctrine around C-IW our C-UW is useful on many levels. Hopefully it will gain some traction.