Comments on: Excerpt: The Counter Insurgency Bible

By: Sven Ortmann

Sven Ortmann — Tue, 22 May 2007 23:14:48 +0000

I’m not sure whether this one is a ” bible” for COIN. There was another work of a British officer ome decades before that also contributed a lot to modern COIN knowledge.
Anyway, even with lots of light infantry it would most likely be impossible to reduce centuries-old conflicts within few years so much that those conflicts couldn’t break a young and foreign-imposed democracy.
On the political and sociological side it appears to be impossible to run a war with very little if anything to gain but extreme annual costs for more than a couple years. The human factor is a major contributor to western militaries’ expenses, so light infantry armies wouldn’t be much cheaper than actual Iraq COIN.
In the end, the western democracies seem to decide right everytime after enough time for thought — they agree that wars for no real benefit are not worth the expense and end them.
Nobody needs to care whether Iraq or Afghanistan are democracies. If the creation fo democracies was the mission, money could be spent much more effectively by promotin democracy elsewhere.
And if it’s about the oil — well, even before teh 2003 Iraq war were the U.S. expenses for military power in the Persian Gulf region on the same order of magnitude as overall net U.S. oil imports.
In the end, only the owners of some companies do profit.

By: jman

jman — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:19:11 +0000

Shineski may have been right, or wrong. Where all those extra troops he wanted light infantry troops? or where they going to be mechanized infantry and armor, like the majority of the US forces in 2003? I also wonderhow well trained those troops where in fighting insurgencies.

By: Hoax Meister

Hoax Meister — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:14:00 +0000

Sounds like Rumsfeld was trying to do! I hope your kidding. I suggest you reread you reread the part about having “infantry, and then more infantry.“
Shinseki was right–not Mumblin’ Rumsfeld.

By: Dave Curtis

Dave Curtis — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:08:46 +0000

As for the last paragraph from the excerpt, the nonmilitary tasks for military personnel, how close does this come to the mission of the Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG)? If anyone at all knows, is the AWG just another group of shooters, or do they do these varied support tasks as well?

By: Mike Burleson

Mike Burleson — Tue, 22 May 2007 01:19:21 +0000

Sounds like what Rumsfeld was trying to do, but he was stymied at every turn, and then blamed for the fallout.