30 March 2015

The key to understanding our wars: the trinity of COIN



Summary: Most of our wars since Korea have been counter-insurgencies (COIN), in which we employ a trinity of methods — firepower, mobility, and militia. It doesn’t work for us, or for any foreign armies doing COIN. Today we review the trinity and why it fails, and ask the more important question of why we don’t see this pattern. {2nd of 2 posts today.}

Out of 3 tools come one outcome (Celtic Trinity Knot).

Since Mao brought 4GW to maturity after WWII, modern armed forces, whether of developed or undeveloped nations, tend to rely on a trinity of methods to fight insurgencies. None of these are new (almost nothing is new in war; it’s all a matter of combinations, emphasis, and execution).

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