Contrary to my statement above, I believe we have to focus on the populace, because a mobilized populace is a powerful weapon. Thus the softer side of irregular warfare where we focus on providing basic needs, hope for a better tomorrow, education, and an alternative narrative to the enemy among other activities is critically important, and perhaps even decisive over time. I think most of us agree on this point to varying degrees.

This is why I think Secretary Gate's push for a whole of government approach (team effort) is the basis of enabling the strategy. A promising sign that we're perhaps moving in this direction (ever so slowly) is that the State Department was recently given several million dollars to take lead on the counter propaganda war in Afghanistan. The military role in irregular warfare is not "the strategy", but simply one leg in the total effort, and its role in this soft zone should largely be focused on providing security and logistics to enable the other legs (do gooders) to their work.

The problem since 9/11 is that the military was implementing the entire strategy by itself. Sort of like putting a football team in the field that only has an offense team. They know the principles of defense, but they're not very good at it. This has forced the military to play positions on the team that they were not prepared for, and now it has become the norm. Of course the danger is we're weakening our offense team by making them play defense. Not until recently have we seen a concerted interagency effort to get into the fight and better enable a holistic strategy, but I suspect we're still a long ways off from getting it right.

Our senior military and many junior leaders in the field are focused on building schools, improving the economy, and taking a stab at good goverance (good luck on that one), because they know it needs to be done and no one else has been picking up the ball and running with it. Now that the team is "begining" to get flushed out with the appropriate interagency players we may need to reassess what the military should be focused.

I think Mike F. took a good first stab at it with:

1. Control the Physical Terrain.
2. Control the Populace.
3. Conduct Intelligence Collection.
At a minimum I would add:

4. Provide security and logistics support to the do gooders.
5. Conduct offensive operations against the enemy.
6. Help build host nation security force capacity.

I know there are multiple schools of thought on what comes first in the counterinsurgency chicken or the egg argument, but I'm in the school who believes you have to establish security for the populace before you can develop their economy and establish good governance (if a government can't protect its people, then it is a stretch to claim they're providing good governance).

I disagree with Bob W's assumption that the people are fighting for good governance and if we provide it we will take the wind out of their sails (as I understand the argument). The enemy we are fighting today is not fighting against a dictator, they are fighting against good governance. They want to be in charge to facilitate their criminal activity, or impose a stone age political system based on an extreme interpretation of their religion. We won't win these die hards over with good governance, rather we must win the people over to gather the intelligence on who these folks are and where they're at so we can kill them, if we don't remove the cancer we will not win.

During 2003-2005 in Iraq, as many have stated, we conducted drive by COIN, by executing nightly raids to go after suspected insurgent leaders, and then we turn the populace back over to insurgent control. Since we were only focused on offensive operations, rather than providing security to the populace, this strategy proved ineffective and of course led to resentment of our forces in many cases. It wasn't until the surge (in some locations prior to the surge) that the military adjusted its military strategy and pushed out into the streets to protect the populace which had telling results (however, the results are only temporary without the right team coming in once security is established to start fixing the other problems). Since we had even less forces in Afghanistan (a much larger country), we obviously left a lot of terrain under the control of the enemy. In short, we didn't execute the military portion of the strategy very effectively. The military can't blame the interagency for failure to follow the basics of military strategy of taking and holding physical and human terrain. Instead we pursued some network targeting "theory" that continues to fail us. The network targeting theory would be a great supporting effort to a real clear and hold strategy (which would result in more dead insurgents), but it is no way to win this this fight.