Divine Wind
Platinum Member
Is our strategy in Afghanistan working? Is COIN the best way to handle it? Should we bail or should we send in reinforcements?
I think COIN, Counterinsurgency, is the most effective means of winning a war against a guerrilla force hiding among the local population. Unlike conventional warfare, it isn't as easy to determine victory since it usually doesn't involve large battles, defined front lines or acquisition and control of real estate.
http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/coin/repository/COIN_Center_Pamphlet.pdf
US Army Combined Arms Center | Blank Page
I think COIN, Counterinsurgency, is the most effective means of winning a war against a guerrilla force hiding among the local population. Unlike conventional warfare, it isn't as easy to determine victory since it usually doesn't involve large battles, defined front lines or acquisition and control of real estate.
http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/coin/repository/COIN_Center_Pamphlet.pdf
In the conventional war, military action, seconded by diplomacy, propaganda, and economic pressure, is generally the principal way to achieve the goal. Politics as an instrument of
war tends to take a back seat and emerges againas an instrumentwhen the fi ghting ends .
The picture is different in the revolutionary war. The objective being the population itself, the
operations designed to win it over (for the insurgent) or to keep it at least submissive (for the
counterinsurgent) are essentially of a political nature. In this case, consequently, political action
remains foremost throughout the war. It is not enough for the government to set political goals,
to determine how much military force is applicable, to enter into alliances or to break them; politics becomes an active instrument of operation. And so intricate is the interplay between the political and the military actions that they cannot be tidily separated; on the contrary, every military move has to be weighed with regard to its political effects, and vice versa. David Galula,
Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International,
2006 [1964]), 66.
US Army Combined Arms Center | Blank Page