05 July 2009

Links of the Day

Two articles from Defense and the National Interest stood out today.  

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:

El Goyito said...

Enough already! Stay off the laptop and enjoy Australia duuude!!!