Gates goes hybrid

I have had COIN theory drilled into me from all sides over the last four years, and I find interesting the changes in terminology and organization that it has undergone. When my teachers first started our courses, we were taught that the great folly of many "conventional" officers was to look at irregular warfare as a "lesser included" of the sort of maneuver warfare they were accustomed too. IW--and COIN specifically--was supposed to be something different, requiring a different order of battle and a different operational plan.

Now we're back to a "sliding scale" of conflict, where the different situations are understood to melt into each other. I know this isn't the same as the old lesser-included idea and recognizes the different approaches necessary, but the language's evolution interests me.

Doesn't this statement address the concerns of Gentile? I mean, he feels that the Army runs the risk of handicapping itself by eschewing all forms of combat other than COIN. Gates, however, is stating that an effective military must be able to positively respond to a wide variety of combat situations. COIN is but a part of the spectrum and perhaps it will take a more prominent position in said spectrum, but Gates speaks of a spectrum of combat not a spectrum of COIN. Gentile raises concern over the dogmatic statements of Mansoor, Kagan, and Nagl at the end of his article, but shouldn't the aforementioned quote by Gates carry more weight?

Several hundred billion dollars in solar power plants in the southwest is the ultimate weapon of the 21st century. After killing a certain number of people in another country the general rule of thumb is they do not and will not be in love with your country anymore. Recall all our forces from all over the world. Cut-off foreign aid. Stop using oil and become self-sufficient. America does not need the rest of the world- the rest of the world needs us to show them how to be citizens of an educated representative democracy that redistributes wealth while rewarding achievement in the fairest measures possible. Presently we are the gluttonous lying idiots of the planet and the rest of the human race knows it and is imitating us as best they can. Our military has become a massive money making enterprise that corrupts political processes and impoverishes the public. A few hundred square miles of Nevada can power this country completely- it's true, it is not a fantasy, we only need to build a couple million mirrors instead of a couple million.... whatever. To cheap to meter need not be an absurd atomic swindle. We can grow food without genetically modifying it, dousing it in pesticide and fertilizer, and hauling it by truck a thousand miles. We can all have our cars but instead of gridlock we would take them out on the empty freeways for vacations- and have no need of them for anything else. We can have a society that is not based on psychologically manipulating human beings into buying more and more junk and junk food. We can do it and also have the ultimate military able to kick anyones ass. Our potential future conflicts can be massive raids on anyone who commits obvious evil- if we have no overseas interests we are forced to defend and no distant lands we are forced to occupy. That is why Southwest desert is the most valuable real estate on the planet, not middle east oil fields. Our great resource, the ultimate weapon of the 21st century.

I said we should slowly withdraw from obligations that are too onerous in the long term. But withdrawing immediately from most places wouldn't be conducive to our interests.

It's a complex preoblem. We have an interlinking web of bases, supply dumps, etc. It's certainly convenient that we can keep supplies in kuwait, SA, diego garcia etc and move them into iraq as needed rather than have too much of our supplies stored where they are subject to sabotage or attack.

So we need lots of bases where there's no trouble to support the places where there's trouble. We could remove some bases but it's a technical question which ones.

It turns into a question of taking apart big pieces of the whole web, unless we find a better way to project force. We've done that before -- we used to need lots and lots of little coaling stations and the needs changed when we switched to oil.

We probably can't keep up the approach that uses lots of oil. So if we do dismantle it and look for something better, we won't be much behind other nations that explore new ways to project power, and we might be ahead.

But we'd be disrupting a whole lot of careers for people who're busy maintaining the old structures that are increasingly less usable.