Jedburgh, this segment highlights one of the most misunderstood and misused words in our efforts to support the COIN operations of others: "Influence"
Invariably it is stated as it is here, as a verb. Something you do to the populace. I mean seriously, how hard is it to influence someone in cuffs standing on the business end of your M-4?
What is needed, and is much much more difficult to achieve is Influence the noun.
Every commander we've ever worked for could influence us, but how many of them possessed influence with you?
The second piece of this is that this is not our populace, this is not our COIN, and these should not be our detainees. Which leads us to the critical point Influence is closely related to Legitimacy. The government that needs to be developing Influence in the eyes of its populace (both insurgent and otherwise) is the host nation government. This builds their legitimacy in the eyes of their populace and reduces the causation for insurgency.
When we as the intervening FID force attempt to build our influence, it robs from the host nation and prolongs the insurgency. It also builds our perception of legitimacy over that host nation government which also prolongs the insurgency and makes the FID force a target of the insurgency as well.
There are many words associated with employing influence:
Order, Direct, Compel, Coerce, Sanction, Intimidate, Scare
There are also many words associated with possessing influence:
Trust, Stature, Prestige, Respect, Credibility, Reputation, Leadership
We need to not only focus on ensuring that every single engagement we execute, be it a raid to take down an HVT or a ribbon cutting ceremony, is designed to preserve the latter in ourselves, and build it in the HN.
I see this as part of our national treasure, a giant "credibility account," if you will. We have been drawing heavily on that account of late, deficit spending in hopes to make it all back at some future date when this GWOT is over. The future is now. It is time to redesign operations around this one point.
In the past if we could deter one man, we could deter a nation, and if we could deter one nation we could prevail. This was the Cold War paradigm.
Now and increasingly we must deter many nations, many leaders, and in fact many populaces to achieve the same degree of security. I see no way to get there except through the retirement of Cold War / GWOT Influencing, and the adoption of a new strategy of building credible influence.
Easily lost, hard to gain. We have a lot of work to do in this regard and we need to get started.
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