Anyway, this has kinda gotten off the topic don't you think?

Not really. It does stil go along with the OT of

I personally believe that the intangibles of leadership, ?lan, morale, and good doctrine contribute more to victory than any pure technological superiority.

and we are discussing leadership and doctrine.

I agree with skiguy here.  The heart of the topic and my initial point is that technology is not the be all end all in warfare.  This is a point I think the American military has forgotten.  The American military has pursued technology to dominate the battlefield while largely ignoring doctrine.  With the appointment of Petraeus, this has started to change but I fear that it will be only a momentary thing.  For some reason the military is in love with gadgets and think they can make up for any deficiency.  We should not forget that the modern conception of firepower is largely an American invention.I think American military leadership is the best in the world.  But, that being said, we seem to have forgotten some of the home truths of warfare in our blind quest for the holy grail of technology.  The Germans proved in both world wars that leadership, ?lan, morale, and doctrine can amek up for any number of technological inferiorities.  the fact the they eventually lost has more to do with the number of troops available than the individual quality of the German soldier.  Both Mosier and Fergusson have shown that the German army consistently achieved kill ratios of anywhere from 3:1 to 6:1 in the world wars.  The German army simply could not kill their opponents as fast as they could be replaced, technology had little to do with their loss.  German tanks tended to be inferior to allied throughout the war and their advanced models, such as the Panther and Tiger were never available in great numbers.  The German army accomplished wonders with what should have been training tanks but were instead used for frontline service because it is what they had available.The same is proving true in the current war.  The insurgents are managing to do amazing damage given the material they have available, especially in the face of the technological know how America brings to bear.  What does that say about the relative value of technology?  The insurgents main weapons are their brains and determination not the physical weapons they use.

I have a copy of the SF COIN manual form 1969 and it is almost exactly the same as the new manual with some minor changes and additions.  Petraues recycled and updated the old doctrine to bring it inline with the newer communication methods and more advanced cell structure of the insurgents in Iraq.  Petraeus did not invent or introduce COIN to the US and world, he just relearned the lessons that we leasrned at such cost 40 years ago and have had to subsequently pay in blood to relearn because of our lack of instsitutional memory.  The knowledge was there all along it just was not used.

I am not anti-technology.  I just believe that we need to put more focus on doctrine and training and bring everything into balance.  Balance is what is missing in American warfighting at present.  And yes I too recognize that the conventional threat has not disappeared, merely receded for the time being.  However, I can foresee a day in the not too distant future where we will have to relearn all the lessons of conventional warfare because of our focus on COIN.

I would have to look into Army doctrine, I am unfamiliar with it at the moment.  I think the Air Force is near dead-on.  Training wise is more difficult.  With the wide range of missions required of everyone, it is hard to be proficient in everything.  Yet we don't want to compartimentalize and have specific teams only capable of doing one sort of mission either.  There is a balance there somewhere.BTW, did anyone see Future Dogfights on History channel the other day?  A lot of stuff was right on.  They made some educational guesses but I feel they were fairly accurate.

I suppose I could degenerate into some sort of Air Force deprecating jokes here but I will defer that for later.  I honestly dont see a huge role for the Air Force in COIN ops.  To me airstrikes are never surgical and always risk excessive casualties.  Army aviation has this effect as well.  See this for an example: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080522/wl_mideast_afp/iraqunrestus_080522131239;_ylt=AildX.mIvHDs49Dm2MSwFPGaOrgF  The use of airpower is called for in certain circumstances but I generally think air strikes are like using a sledgehammer to kill ants.  My own experience bears this out.  One place where the Air Force has done yeoman's service and leveraged technology as a force multiplier is the use of UAV's.  I cannot praise Predator operators enough.  I got a couple of kills myself that were developed through Predator derived real-time surveillance.  Air cargo is another area in which the Air Force excels although they are little recognized for this.  People tend to conveniently forget the importance of logisitics, at least until they run our of toilet paper.I guess I have to backstep a little after thinking about it.  The Air Force does have a vital role to play in COIN.  What is missing in my opinion is jointness, despite it being the holy grail of military ops since the '86 Sarbanes/Oxley act.  We dont do a very good job of leveraging our technology in the COIN fight or integrating the capabilities of the services.  In my experience, we are still waging separate fights, but i have had a worm's eye view at the level of the Cavalry section, at the pointy end of the stick I have not seen much jointness.  I stand by my assertion that we still lag in the development of effective COIN doctrine, we have made strides forward but still have leagues to go.

But there's nothing stopping us form flooding Google with pro-American "propaganda".

Can you imagine the medias reaction to that?  I can hear the screams from the left now about how America is trying to propagandize the world.

I think the Left would complain more about censoring Google.  As far as planting pro-American videos, so what they complain?  We have the right to do that.I remember the anti-war crowd complaining about us"planting" stories in Iraqi newspapers a while back.

I agree 100%, and I sure wish we were doing something like it, maybe we are just in the background.

No, I have never seen that.  Now that is what I call effective COIN doctrine, That is what we were trying to in my sector until we got relieved and the follow on unit was more concerned with kicking down doors than engaging the population.  A good COIN strategy gets the people to buy into the government and therby enhance their security.  When it works, security grows exponentially because the sea the insurgent fish swim in start to dry up.  The hard part is convincing the people they are better off with the government than the insurgents.  The only way to prove they are is by providing a constant presence among the people, not hide in heavily fortified camps.  When I was deployed we (the US) were aliens who only showed up when bad things happened.  that has changed under Petraeus.  Hopefully it will continue to improve.  What people fail to understand is that improvement is not a straight line progression.  It is more a case of four steps forward and one back until we reach the destination, which is a safe, stable, and secure, democratic Iraq.As you can see.  Technology plays a part, but the human factor is decisive.  This is as true now as it was 4,000 years ago.  That is the point I was driving at when I started this thread.