SWJ Quotable

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.