Hey jester tell us about military learnings from recent conf

[starku]

Cause i see you over there hurting yoursf

And you have talked before about while the public narrative is LOL MILITARY FAILS that at various levels the us military and others is adapting and changing and building new methods which work

And nobody on sdn wants to hear that stuff but I do

[Veef]

can we talk about F-111s

cuz those are sweet

[Aaron]

I am also interested. Especially as from my time in I see the military as largely static.

[Bakustra]

also have you read thomas ricks' fiasco and if so what do you think?

[Phantasee]

what's your favourite colour

[Gands]

can we call you the seer?

[starku]

does he have a talking f111

[thejester]

Cause i see you over there hurting yoursf

And you have talked before about while the public narrative is LOL MILITARY FAILS that at various levels the us military and others is adapting and changing and building new methods which work

And nobody on sdn wants to hear that stuff but I do

man there's this really interesting debate starting to play out that could be characterised as an anti-COIN backlash in the US military and security thinking more broadly...which I could articulate myself but I'm lazy so instead read A (Slightly) Better War: A Narrative and its defects by this cat Gentile.

My interest in this is sort of tangental cause as Gentile says, it's really just a rehash of the arguments during and after Vietnam about why the US lost. The debate then and now is basically flawed in that it relies on two intertwined ideas: that the war is an American affair in which the Vietnamese/Iraqis are auxiliaries (they're not) and that consequently the solution rests in American power, specifically American military power. Like I said on TOE insurgencies are fundamentally political problems and it's naive to think that you as the external third party are going to be able to solve those problems. At best you can create the space for those problems to be solved. Which means stuff like security is important, but for an Army as an institution that's basically a tactical problem that can be adapted to reasonably easily depending on the existing structure and doctrine of the Army in question. Again at this point it's worth noting that circa 2004-5 everyone was having a fap over the British Army and it's alleged mastery of COIN, the most pressing example of which was Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup With A Knife. Come 2006 and it turns out the British had totally botched the job in Basra, and some scholars started pointing out that the British Army's 'awesome' COIN record often had very little to do with it and everything to do with the pseudo-ethnic cleansing colonial authorities were willing to undertake in places like Kenya and Malaya.

tl;dr, it's starting to be realised in military circles that the COIN narrative has some massive holes and that turning militaries into giant constabularies is not necessarily a good diea

[thejester]

also have you read thomas ricks' fiasco and if so what do you think?

yeah I read it ages ago, but I haven't read his follow up which seemed to buy into the surge narrative pretty wholeheartedly. I thought Fiasco was good but it suffers from all the usual problems of the 'journalistic first draft' (which isn't really Ricks fault); unlike the above it at least looks at ideas of governance etc.