Re: CHART: These Are The Countries Where Terrorists Pose The Greatest Threat To The U
ive been to afghanistan.
yes petraeus used hard power,but his focus was on non collateral damage,and minimizing civilian casualties.i am not confusing anything,your comparing using drones to cause collateral damage with soldiers who work in teams to inflict damage toindividual targets while minimizing civilian casualties
No. I am comparing drones who focus on individual targets while minimizing civilian casualties with ground-based operations that focus on either individual or group targets while seeking to minimize civilian casualties. And your description of the Rumsfeld Doctrine as somehow equating to "hard power" is indeed confused.
if you were talking about drones vs things like bombings and mortar stikes,your right,but the military does neither now,as it has been 100% innefective against insurgent warfare.
That is also incorrect. Both regular aerial delivery and ground-based indirect fire have proven that they have a role to play in counter-insurgent warfare, although it is more limited than traditional, peer-competitor, linear fights. Insurgents do not only fight while surrounded by civilians.
if you were withing the coin strategy,you should have fully understood its not a convential war and conventional tactics are useless.
That's interesting. So if you are walking a patrol and find yourself in a near ambush, you shouldn't turn and assault the enemy position because conventional tactics are useless? No longer should you ensure to initiate ambushes of enemy patrol formations of your own with the highest casualty producing weapon because conventional tactics are useless? No longer do you need a reserve force, no longer do we require presence patrolling, no longer do we require the utilization of ISR, no longer do we maintain dispersion on patrol, no longer should the rear facing man or gun truck cover the backwards-facing long axis, because hey, conventional tactics are useless?
I think you are confusing
tactics with
strategy. COIN is a
strategy.
of course no soldier should just die to appease the populace,the goal was minimal civilian casualties while not only eliminating enemy forces but convincing civilians to side with the us turning in enemy comatants,and crippling their recruitment
Yup. So here's a scenario for you. We went out and recruited a bunch of Iraqi police officers. Hooray, they were convinced to help us fight the bad guys. Then the bad guys came and grabbed them in the night, spent a few days taking them apart piece by piece, and then scattered those pieces across the city as a warning to others. the next time we came recruiting, how many do you think rushed to sign up? If you guessed
zero, you would be correct.
UNTIL we pushed out into the city on a 24 hour basis with
hard power, securing the populace with
hard power, and demonstrated that we could protect them from depredations by utilizing our superior
hard power.
Then we started seeing more recruits come a-joining. Because all of that 'turn their hearts and minds" stuff is
useless unless you can first win the hard power fight and protect them from reprisal by the enemy.
how our current wars are fought,coin is a must,however our next war may be much different,i fear generals may try to use coin where it doesnt apply much as generals tried to fight vietnam iraq and afghanistan like it was ww2.
That would not surprise me at all. As we move into the ODTAC environment, my one great hope is that we have raised a generation of thinker/leaders with a lot of experience in experimentation.
I cant tell you if we even have a regular program of drone strikes,i know we quite often cross sovereign boarders to perform thm,which is an open declaration of war
No it is not. Both the Pakistani and Yemeni governments approve of US drone flights in their airspace, much as we approve of the Russian military flights over US airspace as part of the Open Skies program.
the us seems to cling to the fact that those countries are too poor and disorganized to counter such acts.however when i was in afghanistan,drone srikes were common,they used to launch them for everything,we used apaches often,but drones tended to be more often.
When were you in afghanistan?