I don't believe we British can hold any form of COIN high-ground (political, military or moral) following the Basra debacle (particularly 07-09). Aden, Malaya, Borneo and Northern Ireland were all of their time, as have been Iraq and Afghanistan and history may well judge that the British political and military establishments were guilty of lazy assumptions and failure to adapt rapidly enough in the the two big post-9/11 conflicts.
The battle ryhthm of train, deploy, plan big op, execute big op, write citations, RiP and repeat ad infinitum does wonders for the Bde and Bn Comd's DSO and career opportunities but is an unremitting failure at supporting a population-centric COIN campaign. Whilst I've served multiple tours on the ground in both Iraq and Afghanistan I don't claim any great insight or undertanding (indeed as my ICSC(A) DS may have written, " MB's work is both new and thought-provoking; unfortunately that which is new is not thought-provoking and that which is thought-provoking is not new"). I'm misappropriating and misquoting again (this time John Paul Vann) by suggesting that we didn't have six years experience in Iraq. We had six month's experience twelve times over.
In my experience the US military (and the Army and Marines in particular) in these environments have very much been learning organisations and we could ourselves learn a lot from them. Learning both in terms of COIN operations as well as the ability not just to jump through the post-operational hoop of identifying lessons but to put them into practice pre, during and post deployment. How many times have you heard someone in a British uniform describing something as "an iterative process"? If you actually challenged them to explain what they meant by that they'd quite often have trouble doing so. Too often in the British army the ability to speak with authority, parrot doctrine and point at things in the Brecon manner masks a veneer-thin intellectual base which can all too easily be exposed when it encountering anything slightly off-piste.
Well, even if nobody else does I feel better for having got that off my chest. Goodnight all.
MB
Last edited by Mahogany_Bomber; 5th Apr 2013 at 09:46.