OEF Philippines: Thinking COIN, Practicing FID - Lieutenant Colonel Brian Petit, Special Warfare.

Counterinsurgency is the formative mission of today’s military. The dominant missions of the past seven years - Iraq and Afghanistan - have inexorably shaped a new force. Our leaders, equipment, tactics, logistics, and doctrine all bear the traumatic discoveries learned from the Iraq and Afghanistan counterinsurgency campaigns. Reasonably, the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts will continue as the primary shaping experience for U.S. forces in counterinsurgency (COIN) and for the practice and theory of stability operations. Given the dominant hold of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom-Afghanistan (OEF-A) on our military culture, what then, does Operation Enduring Freedom - Philippines (OEF-P) contribute to the expanding aperture of U.S. military counterinsurgency study?

OEF-P is more relevant to the broader COIN conversation now than ever before. The OEF-P operating environment is characterized by strict - yet prudent - constraints executed by a strikingly small U.S. Task Force. Similar constraints are now in place in Iraq and Afghanistan. Legal prohibitions, strict operational directives, host-nation caveats, and reduced U.S. forces are all constraints that force a revision of operational thinking, a reconsideration of tactics, and increasingly disciplined force application. The existing and forthcoming constraints in Iraq are similar in nature to the constraints imposed upon U.S. forces deployed to Southern Philippines since 2001. Under such constraints, U.S. Special Operations Forces in the Philippines apply an operational approach and tactical methodology that has applicability to current and future U.S. counterinsurgency and stability endeavors. The U.S. involvement in the Philippines (2001 – 2009) can be examined as a preview of the way U.S. counterinsurgency and stability strategies and tactics might look in other theaters as governments stabilize and security responsibility shifts primarily to the host nation. This article presents three tactical vignettes illustrative of the way U.S. forces in the Southern Philippines operate effectively within confined parameters...

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