Small Wars Journal

SWJ Quotable

  1. Blog
Mon, 03/14/2011 - 10:37pm
We have been remiss in offering up our SWJ quote of the week. As a bit of remedial action, we offer up this potential SWJ quote of the year by Metin Turcan in his Small Wars Journal article Seeing the Other Side of the COIN: A Critique of the Current Counterinsurgency (COIN) Strategies in Afghanistan.

If the numbers of the COIN soldiers who are watching the war from their screens are more than the numbers of soldiers who see the pupils of the insurgents with their own eyes, COIN cannot disrupt this insurgency. Stated another way, the more soldiers you have fighting the insurgency from behind their screens in their hi-tech bubbles, instead of fighting on the ground in the theater of war, the more easily you fall into this trap. If COIN soldiers are not able to see, smell, taste, and, more importantly, feel the theater (by saying feeling the theater I mean to fully understand the terrain and weather conditions, and the agonies, perceptions, motivations, hatred, happiness of the local people who live in it) they experience a sort of alienation from the reality on the ground.

Comments

truong79

Sat, 02/18/2023 - 5:57am

Permalink

Your analysis sounds very logical and I am also referencing some information from other websites to see what they say, the wordle in this article are quite attractive and appealing to us. I also refer to your attached link.

G Martin

Tue, 03/15/2011 - 9:20am

Permalink

Although I was able to get around it, most guys in the HQs rarely got out of their camps. I'll never forget a planner about to go on his first (and only) battlefield circulation prior to a major planning effort being told in what seemed to me to be only half-jokingly, "Planners don't travel around the battlefield!" I was amazed at how we hid behind our FORCEPRO in order to stay behind desks. In my opinion people should have been asking for a respite from traveling or section chiefs should have been having to hold people back- instead of the other way around. But, we never passed up a chance to remind ourselves we were "warriors"...

carl (not verified)

Tue, 03/15/2011 - 12:06am

Permalink

Second that one Dave. Mr. Turcan, if you are out there, could you comment on how you think the Pak Army/ISI fits into all of this? Your opinion would be most interesting.