Quote Originally Posted by Bill Moore View Post
GPF will also be required for large scale stability operations like OIF, OEF-A, Bosnia, Kosovo, etc. We're all guilty of wanting to chase the shinny thing (with $$$ attached), but in general our tax payers invested over the years invested in a wide range of military capabilities to defend the U.S.. It makes little sense to evolve an organization over decades to conduct irregular warfare, and then give the mission to organizations that were largely focused on winning the fight against conventional forces.
Yes, our taxpayers invested in a range of capabilities with the intention of defending the US. Unfortunately those capabilities aren't always used to defend the US, or at times the definition of "defending the US" has been stretched to quite absurd lengths to justify use of those capabilities.

I agree that GPF are necessary and that they should not be retrained as development workers or pseudo-SF: that would degrade their primary capacities and those capacities might be needed someday.

If we discover that we're involved in efforts that we think require huge numbers of armed development workers or large-scale efforts at armed nation-building, we may not need to question our force structure. Might be better to question how we got into that position in the first place, how we can get out of it, and how we can avoid getting into it in the future.

Post regime change COIN is, as you suggest, largely an aberration, and IMO it's not something we need to do better, it's something we need to stop doing. Why we so often insist on lumping it into the same category as traditional COIN (in support of a pre-existing government) is something I've never understood.