Civilian Casualties, Religion, and COIN Operations

[rborum]

Force is simply a tool, nothing more.

Understood. I concur.

the primary purpose of insurgents ignoring Mao's rules and antagonizing the populace is to get their opponents to do the same things and thus turn the populace against the nominal counterinsurgents.

Right. That's what I understand to be the conventional wisdom.

that supposition BTW long precedes their study.

You're right, of course. It is always of interest to me, however, to see data - even with all it's caveats and limitations - that addresses (whether findings support or refute) the suppositions that guide our policies.

There are no easy solutions and no pat answers -- if there were, they'd have been found long ago. You cannot codify human responses and develop a matrix for 'what to do.'

Concur. The notion of "matrix" never even blipped on my radar. Though as a social/behavioral scientist, I quite often bump up against the "matrix mentality" among my engineering colleagues. I know there is no cookie cutter approach to the strategy of kinetic force in COIN, but I hope there are dynamic factors that are (or could be) systematically considered in strategic planning and ongoing assessments of the mission. There is no matrix, but it seems - though perhaps this is naive on my part - that it might be useful to have some method to guide that dimension of decisionmaking. I'm not asking for one here, just wondering aloud about what the foundations or contours of such a method or decision framework might look like.

Thanks again.