Reaching for a Rule
In reviewing Chet Richards’ If We Can Keep It, Mark succinctly captures a point I’ve been trying to make for a while.
Read the whole thing.…I am dissatisfied with the sections dealing with the differentiation between “true insurgencies” and “wars of national liberation” which suffers from some degree of contextual ahistoricality…
Reaching for a dogmatic rule, which the 4GW school is currently doing with “foreign COIN is doomed”, is an error because the more heterodox and fractured the military situation in a country happens to be, the more relative the concepts of “foreigner” and “legitimacy” are going to become to the locals. Rather than binary state vs. insurgents scenarios, historical case studies in military complexity like China 1911-1949, the Spanish Civil War, South Vietnam 1949 -1962, Lebanon 1980’s, West Afrca 1990’s and Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia and Central Africa the 2000’s should be pursued to better understand 4GW and COIN dynamics.
A deeper understanding of these dynamics deserves an organized research program. The first concept - an artifically binary distinction between “foreign COIN” and “native COIN” - has served its purpose by highlighting the need for further work on the subject.
