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What happened to the Holiday Gig. PO3 Bob McCord

Military.com

PO3 Bob McCord I suppose you would have to be actively serving right now in the army in order to have insight into this. But something I noticed even is a very low-ranking soldier in the army in the 1990s was that in the early 90s in Germany there was an enormous emphasis on actual war fighting, but in the ladder 1990s up through 2000, so even before 9/11, there was a shift towards emphasis on military operations other than war and peacekeeping or peace enforcement. That stuff seems to have driven the take on counterinsurgency that found itself in FM 3-24 (I get that it's different, but the interpretation of source material for the manual seems to have been influenced by it). However, AT THE SAME TIME, it was in the second half of the 90s in which I personally was exposed to a lot of light infantry, small unit TTPs (in 25th ID). I would actually expect veterans of Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan to have a good understanding of small unit stuff (by which I mean company and below).

I don't think party politics has anything to do with it. The whole COIN religion got going under the Bush administration. I don't think most presidents have much thought about things like small unit training. But I do remember reading things during the 2000s when I was in the defense industry, such as an article seriously asking whether the Warrior Ethos was somehow counterproductive because COIN should be kinder and gentler and essentially (to paraphrase what I remember of the piece) US troops should focus on showing people how wonderful Americans are. That thinking was counterproductive, I think, (I've never been to Iraq or Afghanistan), as an Army exists to win wars on the land.

I was watching or reading something the other day in which they said that Alexander(?) considered victory to flow from good Soldiering, not good generalship. I don't know that I agree with that exactly, but I do think that if your execution is poor, then it doesn't matter how good your plan was, you're gonna get smashed. It is the small units (company and below) that ultimately do the fighting. If they don't know how, you're gonna get smashed.

SGT (Join to see) - Regarding civil security and the surge - should anyone actually read that book-length post I just wrote. The emphasis on civil security is the right emphasis - I don't disagree with that at all. I think the best books I've read on insurgencies and irregular warfare are Mao's On Guerrilla Warfare and Robert Taber's War of the Flea. Largely from those perspectives, (but not entirely), I think you're dealing with whether the population thinks the government has a legitimate claim to authority, and so, the population expects the government to fulfill certain responsibilities that the population considers correct for the role of the state. If the state fails to fulfill those expectations, the people will consider it illegitimate and its power will be grossly undermined. Different cultures expect different things from the state. But the common denominator is security. The insurgent seeks to separate the population from the government by creating a perception that the government is incompetent in addition to being corrupt and heavy-handed. Toward this end, the insurgent may engage in acts of brutality even against the population itself (terrorism), because at that initial stage, the insurgent simply wants to create that separation - he is not yet invested in developing a following from the mainstream of society - that comes later. Then the insurgency can move back and forth as needed between phases. But I also think that insurgencies are different from each other. I am skeptical of attempts to address cultural, tribal, and religious gripes with programs focused on economic gripes, for instance. FM 3-24 seemed, from an office in Florida, to be a bit of a one-size-fits-all prescription. Not sure how it was seen by people actually doing the COIN work on the ground.