COIN warfare, once it has become full blown mobile units type warfare, has always been too little too late because it then becomes endless small unit warfare, soon unaffordable to us. The more locals we kill, the more join the guerrillas to avenge the dead, especially in family-oriented rural societies. Even so, you might have noticed that the typical shahid’s profile—usually imported from Arab countries– is not some retard who has no idea that he’s going to blow himself to pieces but rather, quite often, a highly educate and technically skilled individual. In Muslim World education is a big issue, many sacrifice for a son’s education and, upon completion, he is expected to do much for those who sacrificed for him. And yet, most university grads in Mideast have no future. So they are forever a failed investment for their marginal families, a badge of shame forever around their necks. But suicide killing brings a few thousand bucks (a fortune to most Mideast families!)– much more than they invested in the education of the prospective shahid– and fame and respect for the shahid will forever follow his name. When you know the emotional ups&downs of Mideast youths you can see why so many become shahids.

Yet, somehow, we assume we can kill the “bad guys” while getting the people to love us. And yet, our “human terrain” crap consists of broken promises and invariably the death of many as “collateral damage” whom we seek to draw to our side. In the end we get what we look for supporting us: crooks that speak English and will kiss our butts for a couple of millions $$$. Their greatest use is in that they will be a cover for American corporate theft of “reconstruction” funds.

I had seen American pacification since a small child. From my perspective, US GIs were the most lovable people on earth (especially compared to the other troops I encountered– Germans, Russians….” And yet to my highly educated parents it was semi-literate American officers telling them what’s best and what to do in countries where Americans are invariably intel blind, language deaf and culture dumb, somehow convinced that they can prevail nevertheless. In Iraq and Afghanistan we started out with an imbecile president, a schemer SecDef trying to replace the president in 2004 and a lot of pin headed bureaucrats passing the buck, allowing it to always land in the pockets of Bush’s corporate friends. The idiocy of America’s brass was legendary– still is. To make things worse, self-promoters like Petraeus left a trail of their “intellect” like droppings to characterize their acumen, emphasized by the incredibly dumb and dishonest dropping of their peanut galleries of civilian military affairs “experts.” And the results in both countries: massive unemployment while KBR brings in Third Nation Nationals as cheap labor instead of using local nationals. The youth became cannon fodder for the enemy and as our commanders sought promotion through high body count (theirs) and low casualties (ours) by killing people indiscriminately, the revenge motivation went sky high. But of course, the American community college graduate running the local pacification team was not about to grasp the local nuances.

Now an old man, I always despair over the ignorance of most Americans because they don’t care– especially now that they can truly say: AIN’T MY KID GOING TO WAR– and at all the war profiteering bureaucrats and “experts” who push their monologues on people, astudiously avoiding dialogue so as not to expose their chicanery and polemics.

Our deaf, dumb and blind soldiers are moms and dads. They have families to go back to and want to shoot first and look only when feeling safe amongst the body count; anyone can understand that. What is not understandable is American hubris, especially when it comes from assumed affordable ignorance. Well, Jack, the best and brightest did the American economy far more damage that binLaden would ever have dreamt of doing. The mediocrities hiding behind the flag have done to America’s global position an equal amount of damage. And still, the mediocrity star whores generals still think that these wars have something for them to exploit for career futures. That’s why we’re losing; because we assume that we can be dumb as dirt because everyone in the world is inferior to Americans. So, Jack, how many more wars do you think we can lose and how many more Wall Street collapses can we recover from before we go the corrupt way of the Roman Empire? While our “Rome”– Wash DC– burns, mil acads fiddle with distinctions without differences between COIN theory and practice as if either were really guided by knowledge and forethought. I cry for our America at the hands of mediocrities. No one would allow a doctor to practice with a record like the Pentagon generals’ 92,000 pages leaked to the press. And yet, our putrid media and academia, instead of seeing the dialogue prospects of so much intel, just Tsk, tks it all while the patriot who released it pays with a long prison term.

The outcome, over and over again gentlemen, speaks for itself. We who had to swallow Vietnam’s outcome realized that JUSPAO was not enough to hide the inevitable truth. Now Petreaus’s peanut gallery of psyched-up abstract warmongers like the Kagans and Biddle etc can’t counter the real outcome of Iraq–>Afghanistan…..

By the way, I am very emotionally invested at the thought of my helplessness as a citizen in preventing the mother&dad casualties abroad and all the orphans at home, having so avidly supported Bush in 2000 and Obama in 2008. If you were a healthcare provider and had vets coming to you desperate because the VA dropped the ball (having worked there I know that the best and brightest in healthcare DO NOT work there) and they need care NOW, you would feel personally the fate of this generation’s volunteers upon return. As with Vietnam, many know the real ground level abandonment due to cutbacks for the sake of other electoral priorities.

But of course, no need to deal with anything said or the arguments made because each deems his little tactical piece of the issue as the ultimate expertise. The little piece of tactical sky you saw there is “THIS IS IT!” and never mind in which direction the inevitable history of the Iraq/Afghan wars is going. Just hang the previous top general and hail the new one and that way you get endless do-overs as if nothing happened that should not happen again. Well, when you’ve seen what the Soviets did there and what we’re doing– I mean in terms of the lowest common denominator– sending in our intel blind, language deaf and culture dumb soldiers…always justifying as: “hey, no one forced them, they volunteered”….then you have the current situation. But fact is, Americans would rather increase your risk, even make your work useless, once the $-cost reaches past their economic tolerance threshold and stop the $ hemorrhage. THAT is the fact and all the interpretation of caps to emphasize decreed as hysteric will not make your case.

Recently I saw an army truck at a town fair attracting kids with a video game on a large screen in the back of the truck; they got to shoot bad guys, watch them bleed and fall by the road side. THAT’S HOW WE DRAW IN VOLUNTEERS– WITH VIDEO GAMES KILLING THE BAD GUYS!!!! (that, sir IS what my hysterical rage is all about as someone plans for another generation of wasted volunteers!).

But there are some problems…

1.) COIN or whatever we want to call it, has yet to translate upwards from military theory to politics, or at least the policy formulation process which advises politicians. All the good theory in the world is useless if its not a part of the process that decision makers use when considering conflict as an option.

My study in this area always ended at the level of tactical more than strategy with those giving lectures and presentations making only cursory nods to what would happen if the ideas there were espousing had to be implemented into a conventional military policy process.

This appears to be an almost willful ignorance of the fact that war as we know it is in a major evolutionary stage and that insurgency/terrorism as a growth area is a reflection of that and not just a by product of not fighting against major industrial nations.

As the Chilicot inquiry seems to be saying there was no factoring in of what was going to happen once the “war” was over, perhaps they couldn’t conceive of it due to their limited spectrum for “conflict” and the highly focused nature of the militaries which were being used but the fact seems to remain, like the elephant in the room, that if it was considered it was either ignored or was genuinely not considered at all, which is worse I dont know.

2.) COIN as a way to fight conflicts runs counter to the nature of the arms industry.

Super expensive super fighters aside, the COIN doctrine is low intensity in equipment and much more focused on considerations which cannot be sold or packaged by an industry which sells in the billions (if not more) of dollars weapons which are designed in most cases to do things (kill, maim, wound etc) which can and do feed back into the cycle of violence much more than “eliminate” the problem.

Worse still is the manner in which a conventional military floods into a combat zone, swamping it with weapons, many of which fall into the hands of the insurgent and thereby fulfilling one of the basic tenants of the insurgent (fight the enemy to gain/capture the weapons you need to expand the struggle).

All of this leads to the “if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” problem which has sadly characterized many COIN campaigns and seems to have been the hallmark or Iraq and Afghanistan.

Military force as the primary option to a problem such as this is very akin to using gasoline to put out a fire, its a feedback situation and one which seems to lead to the idea of pouring more gasoline on rather than a sudden and savage reassessment of the situation.

This is blinkered thinking which reflects the heavy mechanical systems of WW II far more than anything since, large ponderous and brute force being used to blast all and anything which is considered a problem.

Often hidden deeper in RMA thought highly differing ideas can and do exist but are often overshadowed by the almost knee jerk reaction that leads the discussion of the RMA into the cul de sac of more and more expensive military hardware, the technological fix, the war junkie high. John Boyd, famous for his OODA loop, also pushed ideas which went much further and recognized a greater subtlety than any next gen fighter or super aware battle field surveillance system articulated.

3.) COIN may in fact reflect a much larger strain of thought, one running at cultural levels and one which points to a future in which the MAD paradigm of Nuclear war is now also brought into play at a conventional level.

I mean call me a bleeding heart liberal (or whatever derogatory label i s preferred) but even as a military scholar and one who has also served in the military I can see the futility of trying to create a garrison state and the incredibly destructive effects that it would have on culture and open thought.

And thats not even going into the area that past history has shown when states adopt highly militarized postures and allow such reactive thinking to dominate. Unrestrained economic theories, neo liberalism, the rise of the corporate state are all just precursors to the fascist model of for a state or worse, year zero thinking, genocide, and hubris and delusions of grandeur which are fractionally short of megalomania.

Im not arguing for a model of communist collectivism, or socialist radicalism but I do acknowledge that COIN has a direction of thought in its broad based, humanist, social orientated thinking which is an immense leap from the crude and reactionary culture which inhabits the majority of military thought (my apologies for those who may take offense to that definition).

Perhaps the leap required by military minds to grasp the larger social concerns which underlie COIN thought at its most sophisticated (because COIN can and does have some practices which are analogous to conventional military behaviors) are just too far to go for a mind trained to a high degree to see things in a manner that is highly Darwinist, dominator orientated, real politik and zero sum in nature.

Are we just asking too much for a mindset which has been a hall mark of male dominated cultures to roll itself back and make room for others?

And in a sense this comes back to the failure of the political systems to consider outcomes beyond the “hit the nail with the hammer” paradigm. Iraq is a prime reflection of this, the war was supposed to be won, done and dusted and everyone (or the winners at least) could have a big victory parade (some did) and that would be the end of it. That outcome did not eventuate and its easy to see why when you stop looking at everything like a nail.

4.) To the gentlemen from SWJ.

Thanks for coming over to check us out, we have been willing to discuss the failures of COIN but that doesnt make us anti COIN or hysterics or unable to see the value of the ideas it has but I think a few of us here are arguing that its not going to work in any of the current conflicts due to the problems mentioned above and perhaps also because time is one the side of the others who after nearly nearly 60 years of experience in dealing with western military intervention have not only a greater and more comprehensive body or knowledge of what to do when a colonial western power rolls into your country but also systemic and proven track record of behaviors and practices which have yet to be effectively countered using the means currently available to the West.

What I think may differ us here from SWJ (and forgive me if I am generalizing but I take my cues about SWJ from the majority of opinions i find there) is that we thin its time to pull back and either allow for the wholesale reorganization of our militaries, states, political and policy processes and even our cultural values before engaging (if at all) in situations such as these and that the changes required cannot be achieved under fire or while engaged in such high stakes and dangerous operations where its peoples lives that will bear the brunt of failure.

Such changes cannot be done in a combat environment as the mass technological nature of the western approach to war is too well ingrained to allow its realignment when its in motion.

I suppose in that sense I am a “discontent” but in arguing that it has failure I am not arguing for a return to the past but an evolution forward, one that the situation on the ground suggest is coming, if not already here.

But the interim tools that we use today and designate COIN are merely short term means and methods and that at the tail end of the half millennium of western dominance with greater global concerns than what are currently enshrined in economic and political thought we need newer and better means to deal with the problem of conflict that the approaches we use today.

COIN at its best reflects those potentials for newer ways of dealing with conflict, if not wholesale then definitely at the retail end in the idea that there is a greater reaction that will be provoked than can be contained in conventional military definitions or frameworks.

At its worst COIN has become a handy little book of simple sounding ideas, folksy stories and down home homilies which hide behind a veneer of Zen simplicity to hide the fact that they fall down in practice but sound great in theory.

Ed, we don’t have enough soldiers to occupy all of Afghanistan and we are compensating by using what we have exactly as we did in Vietnam: as bait to bring out Taliban so air strikes can be called against them. That’s not COIN! In Vietnam 70% of all firefights were initiated by PAVN. The result you already know. Already a report by the NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH showed that the less WE kill, the less THEY kill. Doesn’t that tell you something? 15% of our logistic costs go to Taliban so they won’t blow up the trucks that make our shooting people possible. What does it take for you to see beyond your nose, where we’re going in the long term? THINK STRATEGICALLY! Cities would not only cost less but would do a lot more (unless we use the same Bush-it contractors we used in the past). Europe would prefer this to SOF crap. Soon US will be alone, bleeding alone, beaten, once again, by men in rags as in Iraq where they stopped killing us only once it was clear we’re leaving….AND ALL FOR WHAT?

Or, maybe you don’t realize all this because then you would have answered your own question. Today four soldiers were blown to bits and two were captured….and it goes on with no end in sight. The more “Taliban” we kill, the more we face. The only case one could make for this idiotic attrition is that as the numbers of men in armed forces go up crime in US cities goes down. But somehow I don’t think that the enlistment bonus is attracting criminals away from crimes. Rather, seeing America’s wealth decline, they look for greener pastures and cops do less arresting and reporting of crimes. We are slowly exsanguinating our men. A couple of cities are easier to defend than a lot of mountains. I’m really surprised by your sarcasm. It is people, not just money, we and the Afghans are losing as we leave. In the end it comes down to Kerry’s question about Vietnam: WHAT DO YOU TELL TO THE PARENTS OF THE LAST AMERICAN KILLED ON THE WAY OUT?