From AE over at Simulated Laughter:

As Younghusband notes, North American security thinking is, in a large part, a search for the “next big thing.”

In this case, however, COIN is the current big thing. It was never the Next Big Thing ™. Had it actually become the Next Big Thing during the 1990s, OEF and OIF would have looked alot different.

First, during the 1990s we were told that there wasn’t enough risk of stability operations and COIN missions to justify tailoring our budget to them.

Then, circa 2004, we were told that these operations in Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn’t last long enough for procurement to have any effect on them. We’d just have to carry on with what we had.

Now we’re warned that we’ve already done too much on these OOTW missions - we’ve been neglecting our conventional warfighting compentencies! We have to get back to rebuild our conventional force after the procurement holiday we took for OEF and OIF.

What I find troubling in this progression is the time lag between operational adaptation (in terms of tactics, training, and doctrine) and acquisitions priorities. Budget priorities lagged too far behind actual strategic shifts, leaving us playing catch up. This mismatch between budgetary plans and strategic assessments drives Kaplan’s pendulum swings.

Adaptation will be an inescapable part of our strategic planning, due to our status quo role. Innovative adversaries take our strategic posture as a given and then search for vulnerabilities to exploit. Even when we forecast accurately and successfully adapt to it, we simply have created a new environment (which, since there is no free lunch, will have its own vulnerabilities).

The Robert Kaplan article that kicked this all off discusses a number of frightening asymmetric scenarios. The specific scenarios will change, but these sorts of nightmares will always exist because our adversaries are intelligent actors who look for advantages. The proper response is not to attempt to address every potential danger, but rather to bring budgets and strategies into greater alignment, reducing the momentum that causes overcompensation for past strategic errors (investing in thousands of MRAPs, for example, is likely an example of such overcompensation).

Sometimes insurgent groups manipulate news coverage through effective propaganda.

Other times, they take a more direct approach:

“I received an anonymous call last month,” said Ahmed Salah Salim, a senior producer for Shabelle, whose shows include one with the roughly translated title “Peace Way.” “He said, ‘You can’t present programs against us,’ and I said, ‘Who are you?’ And he said, ‘You will know if you keep doing what you are doing.’ “

Shy and Collier [1] point out that when assessing the popular appeal of an insurgent movement, it is usually difficult to separate the genuine appeal of the group from the tacit support it gains through threat and intimidation. Status quo forces have a predisposition to blame threats for all of an insurgency’s popularity. In the case of Somali, however, such a perspective might not be far from the truth.

These days, it is potentially a life-or-death decision whether to report such basic information as the number of civilians killed in a gunfight. Talk-show hosts realize they may be putting their lives at risk to air a program on good governance.

[1] Peter Paret, Makers of Modern Strategy, Ch. 27, John Shy and Thomas Collier, “Revolutionary War,” pp. 815-862.