conventional is
The part I put in bold is exactly the result of indoctrinated thinking or a conventional approach. The way you're stating it, any patrol you send out will have to go a "specific location" to do a specific task, which probably means they have a specific route. If someone runs out of the house and talks to them, then that is a bonus. It may be a bonus, but it sure as heck isn't a presence patrol.If I send a patrol to see a school teacher to garner information about the schools, and they run into another dude to give info on something else, then that's an added bonus.
My hypothesis was that they should not drive around for the sake of driving.
If you tell your guys to drive or conduct a foot patrol around sector E, or neighborhood Y, to show presence, engage the populace to get a sense for what is going on (it will greatly inform your pinpointed operations later), with the over all intent to provide the perception to the public that state forces in are the area and available, and to keep the enemy guessing (denying space by creating greater risk), then you're conducting a presence patrol, the bonus is you really get to learn the lay of the land. As one young Marine posted on the SWJ many months ago, you would ideally saturate an area with several small patrols (you want contact with the enemy so you can kill them, after the initial chest bumping you'll own the ground). That requires that conventional leaders think unconventionally and train their subordinates down to the squad level to act independently and then let them act independently (much along the lines of what Hackworth proposed and did).
Conventional minded leaders simply can't handle relinquishing control, and unfortunately that mentality has seeped into our special operations community to some degree also. If you want to be agile, then you have to flatten the organization. If you want to deny space to the enemy, then you have keep a presence out there (not drive to a school, talk to a teacher and drive back).
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