For those that don't hang with the cool cats on Twitter

Yesterday, a number of us in the milblogging/journalism/think-tank community passed the time on Twitter reacting to the following quote from Ralph Peters: 

Think tanks are simply welfare agencies for intellectuals who can’t survive in the marketplace as well as holding pens for political creatures briefly out of office. The Sierra Club should be picketing them over all the innocent trees they’ve killed.

Now, my anger management counselor recommended that I stop blogging about Ralph Peters, if for no other reason than to keep my blood pressure at a reasonable level.  Thus, I'll just direct you to the Reader's Digest version, provided by Abu Muqawama and Ink Spots.

NOTE:  I really don't have an anger management counselor.  Jedi like me don't get angry.

Your COIN of the day

A while back, I was talking with another captain who was frustrated at the military's emphasis on counter-insurgency and "soft power". Much like Ralph Peters, he felt that we shouldn't deal with insurgencies by protecting the population, playing by "rules", maintaining the moral high ground, delivering services, and the like. Rather, he felt that "shock and awe" was the best way to deal with an insurgency. In his opinion, brutality would serve as an effective deterrent against insurgent activity.

"After all", he said, "look at Russia and Chechnya"

Yes, look at how well Russia's heavy-handed tactics are doing in Chechnya:

From the Washington Post:

The details emerged between sobs: the arrival of the security forces earlier in the day, her husband's panicked attempt to flee, the gunfire that erupted without warning. He was a law student, barely 20 and "so beautiful," she said, but the soldiers planted a rifle next to his body and called him an Islamist rebel. Then they took everything of value -- the family's savings, a set of dishes, even baby clothes, she said.

Such heavy-handed tactics by the Russian security forces have helped transform the long-running separatist rebellion in Chechnya, east of Ingushetia, into something potentially worse: a radical Muslim insurgency that has spread across the region, draws support from various ethnic groups and appears to be gaining strength.

Moscow declared an end to military operations in Chechnya in April, a decade after then-President Vladimir Putin sent troops into the breakaway republic. But violence has surged in the mountains of Russia's southwest frontier since then, with the assassination of several officials, explosions and shootouts occurring almost daily, and suicide bombings making a comeback after a long lull. On Sunday, a popular Ingush opposition leader was fatally shot, months after the slaying of Chechnya's most prominent human rights activist...

...Russia has long blamed violence in the region on Muslim extremists backed by foreign governments and terrorist networks, but radical Islam is relatively new here. In the 1990s, it was ethnic nationalism, not religious fervor, that motivated Chechen separatists. That changed, though, as fighting spilled beyond Chechnya and Russian forces used harsher tactics targeting devout Muslims.

In 2007, the rebel leader Doku Umarov abandoned the goal of Chechen independence and declared jihad instead, vowing to establish a fundamentalist Caucasus Emirate that would span the entire region. After Moscow proclaimed victory in Chechnya in April, he issued a video labeling civilians legitimate targets and reviving Riyad-us Saliheen, the self-described martyrs' brigade that launched terrorist attacks across Russia from 2002 to 2006.

The only man crazier than Qadaffi: Ralph Peters

Spencer Ackerman is keen to point out that Ralph Peters is back to his old tricks in the New York Post.

In today's post at Attackerman, Ackerman notes that Peters is claiming that the rules of engagement in Afghanistan don't allow troops to unleash mass destruction upon the enemy. Now, you're probably about to note that in population-centric counterinsurgency, enemy body counts aren't important—it's better to secure the population, clear the area of insurgents, and build security forces and social services on top of these areas—basically separating the fish from the water, to reverse-engineer Maoist insurgency. You know—the "clear, hold, and build" we learned from David Galula.

Well, along comes Ralph Peters to claim that the only way to win is through brute force. Says Peters:

Over the decades, political correctness insinuated itself into the ranks of our "Washington player" generals and admirals. We now have four-stars who believe that improving our enemies' self-esteem is a crucial wartime goal.

And the Army published its disastrous Counterinsurgency Manual a few years back -- doctrine written by military intellectuals who, instead of listening to Infantry squad leaders, made a show of consulting "peace advocates" and "humanitarian workers."

The result was a manual based on a few heavily edited case studies "proving" that the key to success in fighting terrorists is to hand out soccer balls to worm-eaten children. The doctrine ignored the brutal lessons of 3,000 years of history -- because history isn't politically correct (it shows, relentlessly, that the only effective way to fight faith-fueled insurgents is with fire and sword).

The New York Times lavished praise on the manual. What does that tell you?

Bah, those draft-card burning hippie junior officers, peace activists, and humanitarian workers with their New York Times-endorsed Counterinsurgency Manual! What happened to credible news sources like the New York Post, the Fox News Channel, and the Weekly World News! (You know, the only news sources that will host Ralph Peters)

Anyway, I'm stealing Ackerman's thunder when I talk about this. I'll have to quote him directly.

And then, following one of Rumsfeld's famous rules, Peters decides to broaden his attack, going after the generation of theorist-practitioners who emerged from Iraq and Afghanistan determined to ensure that the U.S. would develop a counterinsurgency capability that would allow it to mitigate being thrust into such awful situations. You know. Pussies.

Exactly. Peters, who spent ten years as a military intelligence officer in Germany is once again calling out the current generation of military officers for "forgetting how to kill". Somehow he's under the impression that the military's killer instincts were much sharper in the early 90s, when our greatest challenge was dealing with a post-Oktoberfest hangover, and we had our tanks in Europe lined up to fight an enemy that didn't even exist anymore. Seriously, as much as Peters claims he supports the troops, he couldn't be any more alienated from the realities of the modern US military.