...and railway ties in a room finished with gypsum.

Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
Turning the other cheek got us where we are...
A market segmentation approach would acknowledge the impression two simultaneous wars have on the youth bulge while acknowledging the long-term view of our resident grey-beards.

Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
That, in essence, in this case, gets back to the cost not matching the benefit...
Can we find a way to cost effectively improve America's position?

Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
Which, in turn, creates a problem for the west in the current case because the west is unwilling to use enough force (or to be mean or brutal enough, to put it another way) and thus provides prospective opponents a very exploitable failure of political will. The Comintern and Socialist International did their jobs well.

The problem is thus lack of political will, not a failure of force. Applying minimal force -- up to your (and the COIN crowd's) probable level -- will doom us to a never ending conflict in which the opposition will ultimately gain the advantage due to western emotional exhaustion.
The Comintern & Socialist International comment has me scratching my head...are you saying these folks abolished the bourgeois and associated state in Afghanistan?

I take issue with the apparent implication that all that is needed to regulate conflict is the application of that single variable, force/security.

Over the course of a year in Iraq I learned first hand that the deft application of a mixture of variables (security, governance, economics, information, and diplomacy) in a AO can more or less cost effectively regulate conflict levels. I also note that the daily application of this multivariate formula, to regulate conflict, is often used to great success inside of a variety of nation-states to include the US