Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
So is that a failure to adapt to doctrine or a failure of those concerned to develop effective and useful doctrine? ... Writing a COIN manual does not a COIN doctrine make.
COIN is fully embedded within the 'Full Spectrum' concept which is now the US Army capstone doctrine. If the Sec DoD and CentCom are pushing the COIN (population centric vs. enemy centric) angle then it seems to me that it is more than 'a manual', but there are many layers of implementers for that doctrine to filter through, so there are many opportunities for outcomes to be different from what the designers intended. (That also leaves room for feedback, innovations and improvements, which is what (IMHO) 3.24 and 3.24.2 are to 3.0)

With public policy (which I understand better) you always have a number of possible implementation outcomes. Although the policy may come out as a single message, implementers who receive the guidance may:
understand and implement correctly (and even innovate)
misunderstand and implement incorrectly
understand, but, for many reasons, not fully implement

The less than satisfactory outcomes are often brushed aside, in civilian life, as 'unintended consequences'.

However, it is the right incentives, not 'effective training', that will get people 'to do what the job requires' (Ken White). I am sure some of you watched The Wire on HBO. This was essentially a 5 year TV study in the power of incentives to undermine doctrine. Each social group in the show became increasingly disfunctional as its members were influenced by the wrong incentives created by the wrong metrics: cops counted arrest stats, not public satisfaction; the heroin dealers counted corners not profits; the politicians counted contributions not progress; the educators ‘taught to the test’ not the pupil and the journalist leadership pursued Pulitzers rather than the truth.

The Vietnam-era penchant for body counts is one of the best examples of the wrong metric creating the wrong incentives that ultimately led to a colossal failure. What are the right metrics for COIN to improve its outcomes? That is probably the subject of some other thread on in the SWC.