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Originally Posted by jcustis
Great observations that play into my own struggle to define area denial. Reading your points brings home the fact that despite all the collections assets we have at our disposal, that harness military manpower, very few of them (at least that I can tell) are focused on identifying the root causes of why knuckleheads do what they do.
One place to start might be to question the knucklehead assumption.
Of course some of them may be exactly that: testosterone-addled young men just looking for a fight. In some cultures young men are expected to prove themselves by fighting, and it’s possible that some of them are fighting us just because we’re there, and if we weren’t there they’d be fighting the tribe on the other side of the hill.
There may be other factors involved also. I’ve said this before, but I think failure of government to deliver services or development is overrated as a cause of insurgency, especially in areas where people have very low expectations of government. People are more likely to fight because of anger or fear: either something has been done to them that they didn’t like, or they expect something to be done that they won’t like.
There’s also the foreigner factor. What would happen if some vastly superior power sent an army to our country, removed our government, installed a new one, and told us that it was henceforth our duty to support that government, and if we failed in that duty we would be called “insurgents”? I may be wrong, but I kind of suspect that a few of the people on this forum might be tempted in such circumstances to do a bit of fighting.
In any event, if we want to get people to stop fighting without having to kill them all, figuring out why they are fighting is a reasonable first step, and it’s also worth looking for divergence between the local narrative of resistance and the insurgent ideology.
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