Counterinsurgency Cliff Notes
For rifle platoons in Iraq. Another must-read from Small Wars Journal:
Capt. Craig Coppock, former rifle platoon and recon platoon leader for 1-23 Infantry, 3-2 SBCT in Iraq, has some for grunt platoon leaders. For the rest of us, it offers a view into his world, though a lot of it is the kind of common sense that is probably broadly applicable to a lot of pursuits far from Iraq.
He starts with the suggestion that grunt practitioners advice to avoid trying to conduct COIN behind the “pope-glass.” He includes helpful and effective feel-good cultural hints and avoid breaking stuff advice. He suggests ways to seamlessly combine your security procedures with your civilian interaction agenda. He opines that locals may be able to tell you a lot more about Iraqi police deficiencies than a visit to the Iraqi cop shop will. He counsels not providing the enemy with desired emotional reactions to an operational event, such as killing people, until it has been established exactly who needs to be killed. There’s some technical advice: Know your Standard Operating Procedures for Sensitive Site Exploitation, a.k.a. takedowns on suspect houses. Sample SOPs are listed. He concludes:
“That probably sounds pretty simple. Well, it has to be. We are infantrymen, not rocket scientists …
“Embrace counterinsurgency. It is not the cut and dried direct action fight that we all trained for. It is a thinking man’s game. You must outsmart your enemy. Do not get discouraged when you do not see immediate results. Some areas will be more resistant than others. This is not a reason to write off the AO as a lost cause. You just have a lot of work to do. Start small, start safe. Changing the dynamic of a neighborhood takes time.”
This one captain’s missive probably won’t get near the press that these 12 captains did. Not inflammatory, provocative at all. Way too useful. Also well within his pay grade.
PDF here.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:43 pm on Tuesday, April 29, 2008
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April 30th, 2008 at 7:00 am
[...] An Army captain who is making the counterinsurgency work. You know, Iraq. That war we “lost” as Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said a year [...]