I too believe that war is war, and that it must be executed in its extremes.
Where I differ from most is that I do not believe that COIN is war, but rather a civil emergency and should be addressed as such; perhaps with equal vigor, but with a very different focus. In COIN one is not defeating some other state to preserve one's own; one is repairing the failures of governance to preserve the populace in the longterm, while protecting them from immediate threats in the near term.
Defeating an opponents military while breaking the will of his populace to continue the fight is victory in war.
Defeating an insurgent organization while breaking the will of ones own populace to make a political challenge through illegal means when legal means have been denied to them is tyranny. Such suppression avoids the enduring problem for some period of time as it fails in large part to address the conditons of insurgency that allowed a violent insurgent movement to arise to begin with; making the rise if a new insurgent challenger inevitable.
So yes. "War is War" But all violence is not war, and certainly approaching COIN as war is a common (and U.S. Doctrine), but I believe tragic mistake.
So, if COIN is not war, then FID is not war either, as it is the support of another's COIN effort.
Paradoxically perhaps, I believe that Insurgency often rises to the level of war. For the insurgent he must either make the state evolve or make it go away to prevail; while the counterinsurgent can merely address his shortcomings internally to prevail.
So, if insurgency is often war, then Unconventional warfare to support such insurgency can be war as well.
The state has none of the constraints in dealing with the UW actor that he does in dealing with its insurgent populace, so that can be war, which is straight forward when the UW actor is a state, not so straight forward when the UW actor is a non-state as Al Qaeda is for so many states where they are waging UW today.
More important then to "separate the insurgent from the UW actor" (so that one can deal civilly with one, while waging war against the other); than the tired cliché of "separating the insurgent from the populace." This is the largest problem with the current drone campaign in Pakistan; it makes no such separation and wages war in equal parts against both the insurgent and the UW actor as if they were one. (see thread on Conflation I started a couple days ago for more on that).
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