Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
You use armed force against armed force. An insurgency is the use of armed force. Destroy or defeat that armed force and you have solved to problem in terms of the problem being an insurgency. Anything else is simply none of your problem.
Or, if you're dealing with a revolt or rebellion, you could resolve the issues that started and sustain the revolt or rebellion and end it without the need to destroy and defeat.

This may not necessarily be a military function, but it should certainly be considered in any broad discussion of revolt and rebellion or in discussion of any specific revolt or rebellion. I wouldn't see anything wrong, for example, with a military leadership that was summoned to suppress a revolt pointing out that the revolt had reasonable and understandable causes and that resolving the causes might be easier and less destructive that wading in with killing and destruction.

I think BW has a point about "winning" vs transient suppression. Mindanao is a good example of a fight that has been repeatedly "won" without ever being resolved. If the issues that started the fight remain unsettled, a day, week, month, or year without violence is no more a "win" than a half-time lead is a victory in a football match. Of course military action alone can't achieve resolution, it can only open a space to permit political resolution... but that doesn't make political resolution any less necessary for achieving a permanent conclusion.

We do have to be careful about assuming that conclusions drawn from a broad study of insurgency can be applied to any given insurgency, since every fight is different. This is why I'd like to see the terms defined more clearly and used less casually. An "insurgency" that consists of a populace or portion thereof fighting its own government is a very different thing from an "insurgency" primarily driven by opposition to a foreign occupier; both are very different in turn from the (IMO absurd) construct of a "global insurgency".