Quote:
Originally Posted by Weps
IMO our forces are fighting a new war, with little training in the area, and I can see our military trying to asses and improvise to this radically chaging battlefield that is alwasy in a state of flux, using "Silly String" to detect IED's and I can't remember what it was, something to do with panty hose and something or another. But what the problem is that there is no stability, no real objective.
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This isn't a new war. It's a variation on a very old way of warfare. In fact, our military has fought as insurgents and counterinsurgents many times over. The only problem is that we have never institutionalized counterinsurgency, and this is evident in looking toward some technological solution, i.e. your Silly String example. All the new gear are merely tools, but somehow, we try to treat them as ends.
Take a look at this book (an easy read at exactly 100 pages) that's over 40 years old and used to be issued to cadets here at West Point at some point in the Vietnam era. Unfortunately, when COIN was no longer a fad and it was falsely pronounced that it was a lack of taking the fight to the enemy, we once again lost the opportunity to learn from the past and were sentenced to repeating the mistakes of the past. It is only now, nearly four years after the start of OIF and 3 1/2 years after it was pronounced that we were fighting an insurgency that the Army and Marines Corps have a counterinsurgency manual!
http://www.amazon.com/Counterinsurge...e=UTF8&s=books