Quote Originally Posted by jcustis View Post
Attacking Insurgent Space: Sanctuary Denial and Border Interdiction
I tend to agree with much of what the author wrote. I posted these two paragraphs b/c I think they help highlight how to consider sanctuaries.

If the advantages of sanctuary and access to border transit are critical to the insurgency, then the sanctuary becomes a center of gravity to be attacked. Insurgents in sanctuary are inherently vulnerable because the government they establish within the sanctuary will automatically threaten their host's sovereignty. Other vulnerabilities include the support they need from the local populace, their sources of supply, and their base defense systems. Insurgents must conduct a fine balancing act to protect all of these vulnerabilities, but their challenge to the host government's authority could be their biggest problem.

In a sense, insurgents hand us a gift when they establish sanctuaries and base camps. Most insurgencies are fought on "human terrain," offering few instances when the counterinsurgent can actually find, fix, and fight the enemy. But when the enemy seeks sanctuary, engagement becomes possible. Once we have located and defined the sanctuary area, we can focus our intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets on it and then, in at least some instances, our combat power. We would be negligent if we didn't force insurgents to earn their pay when they congregated and surfaced. Of course, attacking them in their host-nation sanctuary will require synchronization of military and other government agencies' capabilities at the operational level and higher, to ensure that kinetic actions do not result in defeats in the international court of public opinion.