Ski,While I would agree that conventional war and insurgencies are different in style, they are both still warfare and amenable to the same general approach when fighting them.  The rules of Sun Tzu apply equally to conventional and counter-insurgency.  At the ?pointy end of the stick?, squad, platoon, and company; there is very little difference between fighting in a set piece battle and fighting an insurgent ambush.  The difference is scale not the nature of the fight.  Fighting is fighting whether fighting Prussians, French, Taliban, Al Quaeda, or Moroccan horsemen.  The actual experience of fighting at the tactical level is the essentially the same.IMHO we are currently in an interregnum where there are simply no two conventional powers that have the desire to war with each other.  The hyperpower nature of American force projection capability has something to do with this, maybe a lot.  But the fact remains that nobody wants to fight us conventionally (because they would lose or at least think they would).  The caveat is that 9 years of COIN have significantly degraded American skills in conventional war and the adoption of some systems means that we actually have a lower capability than some of our enemies are willing to acknowledge.Most American commanders have lost the skills necessary to wage a shock and awe campaign; their experience has been chasing insurgents around.  Yes, it is still war, but a different style.  I am not certain that we retain the skills to wage a conventional campaign as we did in 2003.  We would probably muddle through as the French did in WWI but the organizational to make it look effortless and suffer few casualties is just not there.  This is especially true at company level and below; there is an entire generation of junior leadership in today?s military that has never learned conventional war in anything but the classroom and indeed has spent the majority of their careers training and fighting in the COIN role.Lastly, COIN is not a new phenomenon; it has new buzzwords is all.  Alexander?s troops in 340 B.C. would instantly recognize the fight in Afghanistan; they fought the same one then in what was then called Bithynia.  Alexander did not win either.  The Indian wars of the 19th century were essentially insurgencies as was much of the Boer War.  The war the Gauls fought against Rome was largely an insurgency as well.In short, we are currently at a time when the prevailing mode of warfare is insurgency.  That cannot last, and I certainly do not think it will.  In 1918 the Allies thought they had just won the ?War to End All Wars? yet 21 years later the same players were fighting over the same blood-soaked ground.  History, military or otherwise, will only end with the heat death of the universe.

I do not put a lot of faith in what many of the folks on the small wars council board have to say.  I don?t post there but I check it out occasionally.  (Personal opinion ahead) They mainly strike me as dilettantes and armchair strategists that want to apply band-aid solutions to deep seated problems.  Their self-proclaimed purpose speaks volumes to me;

Small Wars Council is the Warriors' Council for those engaged in the practice of Small Wars. Warrior in this sense is not a military term — successful conduct of Small Wars requires consideration and coordination across the many elements of power. We are an equal opportunity site, painfully aware that we must transcend individual services, and the military in general, to take a multi-disciplinary, international, multi-cultural look at the challenges of prosecuting Small Wars in the 21st Century.

My discussion below. ;DI would not say that we are having a problem with the counter-insurgency fight; we are having a problem with unreasonable expectations of success.  Counter insurgency is not like conventional war; you don't fight one battle and declare victory.  We have an outstanding crop of young leaders that have plenty of experience actually fighting in a counter-insurgency but only theoretical knowledge at best of the conventional fight.  I would not even really classify the opening campaign of the Iraq War as a conventional fight nor would I do so for Desert Storm.  Those two fights were more like Mike Tyson in his prime beating up a drunk than a conventional war.  The opponents were completely mismatched in both cases.  Over the last ten years or so the focus has been on counter-insurgency and not conventional warfare.  This works for now, but in twenty years if we get into a conventional fight the junior leaders of today will be pulling out the Air-Land battle doctrine of the 80?s and using it. We have not though about what the conventional fight would look like today with today?s weapons nor are we looking to the conventional fight of the future.  The only people doing that are people in academia because the army is too busy fighting the wars they have now to think about what is next.  That, by the way, is a recurring theme in American military history in particular.  There is nobody today who can be said to be the modern military?s Depuy, Starry, or Meyer.  Yes I know they are Wikipedia links but they do well in explaining who these guys were and what they did.  Believe me, there is not their like on Active duty right now except for maybe H.R. McMaster or Rick Lynch; both of whom I have served under by the way and can personally vouch for their different ways of doing business.There are essentially two methods for defeating an insurgency (I will call it COIN because I am too lazy to type counter insurgency all the time).  The first is to kill ALL the insurgents; the second is to eliminate the conditions that cause insurgents in the first place.  The first method is problematical at best because by the very act of killing insurgents you create the conditions for more people to join the insurgency.  This tendency is higher or lower depending on local cultural norms and values.  As should be self-evident, killing all the insurgents should not be the goal of the COIN fight.  It is a self defeating strategy for the most part.Eliminating the conditions that created the insurgency or at least ameliorating them to such an extent that insurgency is not attractive is the strategy most likely to succeed.  There are about million different ways to skin this cat though.  The same strategy that is working in Iraq will not work in Afghanistan.  The conditions of the two countries are totally different.  Below I will attempt to explain the situation in both countries and why the Iraq answer won?t work in Afghanistan.Iraq is a somewhat secular and modern society where tribalism still reigns to a degree.  Don?t get me wrong, the religious impulse is strong in many Iraqis but we were not facing local insurgents who had a primary religious motivation.  We were facing mostly disaffected Sunnis who saw their political and social position go down the drain when Saddam fell.  Petraeus defeated the insurgency by bringing the Sunnis into the government and showing them they could be part of the government and did not have to passively accept Shiite rule.  The religious insurgents in Iraq were and are almost uniformly non-Iraqi.  The Iraqi man-on-the-street hates them just as much if not more than we do.  Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) used VC methods to intimidate the locals into providing protection.  Murders and rapes were common tools they used to coerce the locals.  Once we convinced and proved to the locals that if they gave up the AQI guys we could and would protect them they started doing so.  The trick now is to transfer that legitimacy to the Iraqi security forces.  It remains to be seen whether we can pull that particular rabbit out of the hat.  I tend to think we can but it will be tough.Afghanistan is a whole different animal than Iraq.  If anybody can be said to be pre-technological it is the Afghans.  They are an almost exclusively tribal society that refuses loyalty to anybody that is not of their clan much less their tribe.  I tend to think it will be impossible to get the average Afghan to give their loyalty to a central government no matter how incorrupt in anything that an American would think of as a reasonable time frame.  What we are talking about is the work of 1 maybe 2 generations.  You don?t just convince people to give up 1,000 year old beliefs and habits of thought overnight; it is silly of us to think it is possible.  I don?t know if what we are doing in Afghanistan is going to work, I tend to think not.  However, as long as we have the patience of the American people we will keep trying and something will work.  This is a different kind of fight and no matter how distasteful I find the policing part of it; that is probably what will work.   The application of pure kinetic force just tends to aggravate people?s feelings and grow the insurgency.  We have to make the average Afghan?s life better and somehow convince them that they have a stake in keeping it that way.  We have failed to do this thus far but we are making inroads.  The problem is that as long as there is one group of Afghans that thinks they can achieve their goals by prolonging or at least not stopping the insurgency then it will continue.  It does not help that while many dislike the Taliban, they agree with their religious beliefs.  The conservatism of the Taliban makes David Koresh look like a liberal and some folks just won?t give that up.  Add in the attractiveness and habit of warlordism and the Afghan situation is orders of magnitude more difficult to solve than was the insurgency in Iraq.

Exactly, eliminate the conditions and terrorism/insurgency stops.  The discussion from here moves onto what are the conditions that terrorists object to in Western society other than our engagement at any level in what they perceive of as “Muslim” lands?  If we can answer this question we are halfway to defeating terrorism.  I know what I think the answer is, what about you?

what are the conditions that terrorists object to in Western society

Who cares?  We don't change on accouont of what they don't like, we destroy them.  Why we're cow-towing to them and not destroying them is something I am having trouble comprehending lately.  

I will have to answer this in more detail tomorrow, I don't have time tonight because my son has homework.  But for now, there are many reasons why we should know what the conditions to stop/defeat the insurgency/terrorism are.  Kowtowing is not one of them, at least from a military perspective.  I wish it were as simple as destroying them but no war, especially the COIN fight is that simple.