The Pentagon issues a guidebook on fighting a counterinsurgency.
Like they would know. The only war that the Pentagon is winning is the war against tooth decay.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16222877/site/newsweek/site/newsweek/
Interesting article. Not the obligatory pissy Leftist defeatism in the closing paragraph.
The main takeaway is that COIN strategy hasn’t changed. It takes professional courage to implement. People like to talk about pushing control to the lowest level, but I have rarely seen it.
The problem with winning in Iraq is a two-part people problem.
The first is the “Softest Generation” of Americans, who have been bred to believe that wars are all played out on computer screens and last about 45 minutes. Our military and our govt is a reflection of our Vagisil-needing countrymen.
The second is the, um, poor quality of the human timber we are using to build an Arab Democracy. Some of the Iraqis are very courageous, but the majority appear to be sitting on the sidelines waiting to see who quits first. This is hard for some of us to grasp, the later generations having been indoctrinated w/ cultural reletavism - the idea that all societies and cultures are completely equal and to suggest otherwise is just mean. This makes it hard to accept that some people are just too retarded to succeed on their own.
I have been home for a year and don’t claim any special knowledge about what’s going on right now, but it seems to me that we are not very interested in killing bad guys. It seems that we are going the old “if we just drive around, we’ll keep casualties low” route. We need to relax the restrictions that make it hard to get the bad guys. The locals are going to be pissed anyway, so why not go weapons free?
What is your plan for victory SOPMOD?