Quote Originally Posted by Oredigger61 View Post
Bob, thank you for the detailed response. I sensed it was something along those lines. My reason for asking is that you appear to be plowing ground that I plowed during the period 1974-1980 while course manager for the Navy’s COIN course.

By 1974, the COIN instruction was a residual effort consisting of two classes. First, we taught a two-week seminar about 12 or so times a year. The target audience was the Navy Special Warfare Community and Marine equivalent. However, Army (and some Air Force) reserves flocked to our course because it gave them an ACDUTRA opportunity that was educational. Many of the Army officers were from Reserve Civil Affairs units, so we had a wide variety of knowledgeable folks who passed through our doors. We picked their brains on the way through.

Second, we taught a unit-specific weekend course as part of the Naval Reserve training structure.

Shortly before I arrived on station the staff had flown in Roger Darling for a presentation and video taping session. We then “taught” Darling with little idea of what he was really saying.

One day a student, Tom Grassey, wandered into my office and said we had no clue, we had no one’s attention, and we had no credibility. At the end of his two-week stay we basically said to Tom that if you know so much go out and research the subject and come back and inform us.

A few months later he did just that. One of his points was that we needed to put aside the word “insurgency” and call it what it was, revolution. That opened things up for us. We had been stuck with the terminology of the 1960’s—Left, Mass and Right Strategy. Grassey also pointed us to the construct of “unjust treatment,” which he took from Aristotle.

That led us to David V. J. Bell and his treatment of resistance and revolution. I commend his book to you.

We taped Tom and he published his findings in the Naval War College Review under the title, “Some Perspectives on Revolution.” At the same time, Roger Darling was re-titling his “Military Review” article to be “Revolution Examined Anew.” We gradually renamed our course; it ultimately became a “Political Warfare Seminar," and added the American Revolution as a case study.

We synthesized Darling and Grassey into a unified scheme for qualitative analysis, and added Bell to speak to the distribution of justice component.

Up thread I have a link to a key chart I derived which, at the time, was our understanding of the spectrum of revolutionary conflict and violence. The predicate was that any government has two fundamental tasks, the dispensation of justice (Aristotle, Bell) and the management of violence. The revolutionary goal was to get the government to focus on the latter task.

I have seen little in the intervening 30 years since I last taught the subject that substantially changes what we wrote and taught at Coronado at the close of the Vietnam War.
You're right, we are definitely coming at this from similar perspectives. I look forward to finding some of those old pieces and working through them.