Producing Victory: Rethinking Conventional Forces in COIN Operations (Professional Reading)

Sunrise over Baghdad finds a maneuver battalion executing several missions. Two platoons are on patrol, one sweeping a main supply route for improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the other escorting "Team Trash"-a dump truck and bucket loader-through a poor Shi'a neighborhood. A third platoon is still at the brigade detention facility in-processing several insurgents captured the previous night, while a fourth escorts the battalion medical platoon for a medical outreach in one of the battalion's assigned neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the battalion commander and a company commander prepare to attend a neighborhood council meeting; the executive officer updates the agenda for the weekly fusion-cell meeting; and the operations officer meets with the district police chief and an Iraqi Army representative to discuss security for an upcoming holiday. --- snip ---

Herein lies a vexing problem: The Army fights and wins America's battles through land dominance, not by establishing civic, security, and economic institutions in failed states. Such nation building requires the strategic and operational application of national power (a subject well beyond the scope of this paper), but at the tactical level, COIN and nation-building tasks are the same: Both call for grassroots support and require Soldiers to win popular approval by solving practical problems: turning on electricity, keeping the streets safe, getting fathers and mothers to work and sons and daughters to school.6

For more on this I'd recomend Thomas P.M. Barnett's
The Pentagon's New Map
http://www.amazon.com/Pentagons-Map-Thomas-P-M-Barnett/dp/0399151753/sr=1-2/qid=1162656733/ref=sr_1_2/104-1207478-3799909?ie=UTF8&s=books
And
Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating
http://www.amazon.com/Blueprint-Action-Future-Worth-Creating/dp/0425211746/sr=1-1/qid=1162656807/ref=sr_1_1/104-1207478-3799909?ie=UTF8&s=books

It's not always (or even most of the time) about killing the bad guys. It's about 1. giveing hope 2. marginalizing the bad guys. Example: America still has the KKK around, but they have been marginalized...turned into a joke.

The teams we sent to Japan and Germany were of extraordinary quality.

In some cases, they had been working the problem for three years back home.

The contrast with the Coalition Provisional Authority is shocking, and shameful.

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