There is an interesting notion in Petraeus’s new COIN Guidance, published on Saturday and brought to my attention by the always reliable SWJ:
Employ money as a weapon system. Use a targeting board process to ensure the greatest effect for each ’round’ expended, and to ensure that each engagement using money contributes to the achievement of the unit’s overall objectives. Ensure contracting activities support the security effort, employing locals wherever possible. Employ a ‘matching fund’ concept when feasible in order to ensure Iraqi involvement and commitment.
As for the rest, the same contradictions pointed out months ago by John Robb still persist: on the one hand, troops are encouraged to “look for sustainable solutions” and “foster Iraqi legitimacy”; on the other, classic COIN tenets are offset by a call to “employ all assets”, which means using SoI et al. to “fight decentralized”. As Robb put it,
The improvised theory that led the US military to fund the insurgency (the ‘Awakening’) has transformed the US Counter-Insurgency doctrine (COIN) — a document was so carefully prepared and announced with such fanfare — into a mere pile of paper. Why? Because we have abandoned the doctrine’s binding assumption: that everything we do in counter-insurgency should increase the legitimacy of the host government. Essentially, the abandonment of our doctrine means that the US military is now completely adrift in Iraq without a counter-insurgency roadmap.
