Musings about a military theory framework

[Pete]

A counter-intuitive, yet promising move is to do something that's likely to be associated with failure and weakness. An army could allow the guerrillas to expand their useful repertoire instead of suppressing it as much as possible. The guerrillas might eventually step over a threshold and turn into a rather conventional force. Once beyond that point, it would be possible to push them back ...

What is being suggested might work for a limited period of a few months at the tactical or operational levels, but only if there is a high level of confidence that intelligence would be able to develop an accurate picture of the enemy network that could be used to hit them hard at a later time. However, I doubt that this could ever be done at the strategic or national policy level, as in letting the Taliban take over eastern Afghanistan in the belief that then we would have them "just where we want them." If for no other reason, such a policy would be very hard to sell to the public in countries that vote governments in and out of office.

If one believes what Bob Woodward has written, the Joint Special Operations Command under McChrystal did something along those lines in Iraq. In essence the conventional forces of the Surge were the "good cops" protecting the population while the "bad cops" of JSOC and American intelligence were targeting the bad guys and taking them down. To an extent the same thing was done in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. I wasn't there, but Phoenix is said to have been a CIA, U.S. special operations, and South Vietnamese security apparatus program to neutralize the National Liberation Front/Viet Cong infrastructure in South Vietnam. Depending on what one reads it was an effective intelligence program or the assassination of people on a grand scale, take your pick. For that reason it's best to be skeptical of anything and everything one reads on the subject.