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Sir Robert Thompson's Principles for Counter-Insurgency Warfare.
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2017-09-27 at 3:49 PM UTChttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Grainger_Ker_Thompson#Defeating_Communist_Insurgency:_Experiences_in_Malaysia_and_Vietnam
Interesting read. You can really tell how many of these doctrines we ignored in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. -
2017-09-29 at 7:07 AM UTC*reminding myself to read this properly later
typically though, regardless of what's actually said and what justifications have been given, the wars of the last two decades have not had the goal of 'winning hearts and minds' or 'rebuilding a society' or even conquering and folding a state into the empire - they've been literal smash-and-grabs or wrecking a state so badly that they're unable to maintain commitments to a competitor state.
by this doctrine, the actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and so many others were doomed to fail from the start because the aggressors only went in with short-term goals and no real plans for the vanquished state after the war. -
2017-09-29 at 7:15 AM UTC
Originally posted by aldra *reminding myself to read this properly later
typically though, regardless of what's actually said and what justifications have been given, the wars of the last two decades have not had the goal of 'winning hearts and minds' or 'rebuilding a society' or even conquering and folding a state into the empire - they've been literal smash-and-grabs or wrecking a state so badly that they're unable to maintain commitments to a competitor state.
by this doctrine, the actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and so many others were doomed to fail from the start because the aggressors only went in with short-term goals and no real plans for the vanquished state after the war.
The issue is that we tried to half ass all these efforts so hard. Either you do abide by this doctrine, go in with real intentions for the state after the war and try to achieve victory through the local peoples, or you can be callous, go in and bomb the motherfucker out of them without regard for the locals, steal their shit and leave.
But you can't fight both the PR war and do the smash and grab at the same time. The half-assedness of our actions in the middle East are what wreck us.
