Link number one comes from Dr. Chet Richards, one of John Boyd's acolytes. Richards quotes an article from Small Wars Journal, which told us to stop panicking--since the end of WW2, insurgencies only win approximately 41% of the time, making them officialy much more successful than the Washington Nationals. Still, as Richards points out, that's a sobering statistic. Strangely enough, it actually confirms something that a number of COINdinista playa-hatas have been pointing out for a while--the counter-insurgents have a better track record than the insurgents...although not by much. A win-to-loss ratio of 3:2 is hardly evidence that the US should abandon and neglect counter-insurgency principles. Indeed, the fact that much weaker organizations can muster near-parity with larger powers is a sign that these types of movements will be much more frequent and potentially much more lethal in the future.
Link #2--speaking of COIN-haters, I jokingly used the term "COINdinista Player-Hater" in a post about a month ago. I've seen variants of it in posts on DNI and on Tom Ricks' blog. I can't tell if I used this and it was picked up by Ricks, or if I subliminally picked it up somewhere (Ricks or Exum) and used it myself. Nevertheless, I think we need to start using this as a doctrinal term. Who's with me?
1 comment:
Enough already! Stay off the laptop and enjoy Australia duuude!!!
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