Thoughts on The Battle for the Minds: IO and COIN in the Pashtun Belt
Abstract
Combat Operations provide intellectual comfort. It is what we, the practitioners of the military art, are trained and practiced at. Nonlethal, economic, development-based governance operations are less familiar and provide little comfort. Ends are unclear; progress is incremental. The fact is in the counterinsurgency (COIN) of eastern Afghanistan, the lion's share of nonlethal activity has fallen to the military. We are there on the ground with personnel, organizational support, and resources. The military can fight a counterinsurgency. The expertise and skills that civilian agencies possess are not necessarily available for this fight because of security, bureaucratic, and political hurdles. The essence of COIN is nearly 100 percent political. Politics is all about people, and in this case, people are the center of gravity. These battles require human understanding and skills outside our comfort zone. These human skills require different tools, those enabled by an effective information campaign, smart use of a development strategy tied to basic services, and understanding the power of economics to alter the human landscape on a local level one village at a time. Security underwrites a COIN strategy but is wasted without proper means, mechanisms, and institutions that connect people to their government and separate them from the insurgents. Such proper means, mechanisms, and institutions are new territory for conventional forces, territory that lies squarely in the realm of nonlethal operations. Provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) focus their efforts on the nonlethal governance and economic lines of operation. Some PRTs fight; others have no need to. No two PRTs are the same. Provincial reconstruction teams are well positioned to act in the information operations realm, as they are local, informed, on the ground, and tied closely to the government at the district and provincial level.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2010
- Accession Number
- ADA529213
Entities
People
- Larry Legree
Organizations
- United States Department of the Navy