Saturday, February 12, 2011

What I do on Friday nights due to a lack of a social life

There have been a lack of posts by me despite a plethora of events occuring throughout the world because I have been stuck in an exercise for the past week. The exercise was a culmination event for the BCT S2 course and involved NCO's from the basic NCO course and advanced course as well as 2nd lieutenants from the officer basic course. After spending my time stuck in a trailer from 8 am to 5 pm the last thing I wanted to do was come home and type away for an hour about events.

So yeah, Egypt threw out Mubarak; vote counts confirmed that southern Sudanese want independence; protests occured in Bolivia against President Evo Morales; and fighting broke out between Thailand and Cambodia over a disputed temple.

Lots to write about, but I'm not going to blog about any of that...old news.

Instead, I'm going to post some notes I wrote about a week ago. They are my thoughts and comments about insurgency/counterinsurgency. There is no real order and most of them are just questions that should be thought about when first arriving in country.

- Why are operations / events in Iraq / Afghanistan classified?
(I understand why a specific operation would be classified, don't want the bad guys to know what we are doing, but why are the daily events and attacks classified? Disclosure would prevent incidents like the Wikileaks problem)

- We need to trust our own media and population.
(Goes to the above statement. Our own population needs a better understanding of the fight and the military should trust our citizens to make informed decisions based off that understanding.)

- Counterinsurgency is not just a fight for the local population, it's a fight for your own population as well.
(If your own citizens don't understand what you are doing or don't believe in the cause, you can't do proper counterinsurgency because your government won't give you the resources you need due to the conflict being unpopular, ie., Vietnam.)

- Why is there an insurgency? Not just the network/organization, but what are the motivations of individual cells?
(I struggled with this one in the last deployment. People don't set out to create chaos "just because", there is reasoning and motivation...figure that out and you go a long way to defeating the problem.)

- Social networks can help bring down governments. Can they bring down an insurgency?
(Thinking out loud on this. Can a mayor or local security force commander Tweet his way to victory? Would a Facebook page allow for more anonymous tips from the population?)

- What does the Tribe want?
(Goes back to the question of why there is an insurgency. If grievances can be addressed then less people will be willing to assist the insurgents.)

- How are police departments able to have success against gangs in inner cities? Units need more than law enforcement professionals (battalions were assigned LEPs to help with...well whatever the commander deemed the unit needs help with...ours, the former police chief of Junction City, Kansas, assisted with training some of the local police stations), we need counter gang units assisting at the battalion level.
(A cell or cells in particular areas is likely not made up of hardcore jihadists/idealists. They are often comprised of the local criminal element that has been co-opted by the leaders of the insurgency. They are gangs and thus act like it, just with more powerful weapons and funding. Conducting COIN like a counter-gang operation will likely go a long way to defeating the insurgency.)

- Lawyers, or at the very least, legal specialists, should be pushed down to the battalion level in order to assist with the warrant process.
(One of my biggest challenges and frustrations was the warrants needed to detain and hold individuals. I'm just a guy in a green suit, I have no training on dealing with judges or how to develop a warrant packet. Yet, I was expected to be the subject matter expert for the squadron and provide guidance on how to obtain a warrant.)

- Are warrants a knee-jerk reaction by the host nation to mass detainments conducted by the counter-insurgent? If the counter-insurgent is more careful about detainments and focuses on targeted raids against specific individuals will that mitigate the demand by the government that warrants must be issued for an individual to be detained?
(I just want that asshole who has been blowing shit up off the streets, I don't want to have to deal with weeks and months of evidence collection to get some stupid piece of paper that lets me capture him.)

- Don't get focused on the boom, watch the big picture.
(I've been guilty of this as well, getting too wrapped up about the IEDs going off and not focusing on the situation allowing the IEDs to be emplaced or built in the first place.)

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