Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
in everything we do. Taking out an enemy Squad may be simple but what that Squad was doing at that location may have several orders of effect and it may have been better to have bypassed them.

Warfare is not at all complex -- policy pertaining to warfare is quite complicated. That is true of MCO and COIN -- and all other variants...
violence is pretty fundamental; and warfare is violence for the sake of politics. Warfare between to separate parties is a clash of separate politics for separate populaces, a resoloving of conflicting interests that could not be resolved by other means. CvC spoke to this, and most thought on warfare is on this dynamic.

insurgency is all about internal politic (discounting the external politics and interests that are often engaged by FID and UW forces that show up at various insurgencies around the world to wage pawn warfare at the expense of that troubled host). More like an election gone bad, when the votes don't count, when the supreme court can't resolve it, when the populace rejects what the government is dishing out. Still politically driven violence, but to very different terms. Is this more complex? Perhaps not, but it is definitely much harder to grasp as the inclination of politics is to blame the other guy and refuse responsibility for ones shortcomings; and effective COIN requires that hard look in the mirror first.

So effective COIN goes against our human nature. Effective conventional warfare is at the essence of our human nature.