Source http://www.mod.uk

If there was one single takeaway from last week’s conference it was this…”Everybody fights…!!” It was hammered home by the US and Canadian representatives who attended and validates that concept that everyone deployed into an operational AO in high-end theatres like Iraq and Afghanistan must first and foremost be a warfighter…

Anyone who goes out the gate must have the same skills as those who habitually tread out in the bad lands and if there has been one single lesson for both these nations in the last six or seven years it has been that EVERYONE has the same probability of getting caught in a contact, activating an IED of some size, or getting in some other form of strife…

So EVERYBODY receives, extracts and delivers detailed and comprehensive orders; EVERYBODY conducts and participates in rehearsals; EVERYBODY is conversant with Immediate Actions and force SOPs; and, where possible, EVERYBODY has a secondary skill to bring to the party so that there are no single points of failure when it all goes noisy…

Those who may expect to spend a large proportion of their time within the wire might also wish to have a bit of a rethink as once all those containers are stacked, blankets counted and bolts tightened, they represent a large proportion of combat power that can be employed in local security, route clearance, population engagement, etc, etc, etc….

COIN is not and never will be a checklist…EVERYBODY needs to think and keep thinking to stay alive and achieve the mission…there is no room for rubber stamping compliance or templated solutions for their own sake – every situation is subtly different from the one before and must be considered in its own context…a key implication from this is that domestic training, outside the force generation or predeployment training environments, MUST provide opportunities for leaders at all level (including EVERY soldier – it’s called self-leadership) to confront complexity and uncertainty in every day they are on the job – and that this must be supported by a firm foundation of a well-embedded organisational ethos and culture…

Kudos to Dean @ Shiloh again for the top job he did in collating and distributing his detailed notes from the COIN Symposium at Ft Leavenworth – Dean, just so you know, we’re reading your stuff down here as well and it was interesting to see notes based upon your observations being distributed at the conference…unfortunately, significant portions of the conference material were classified so I’m unable to share to quite the same degree as Dean however a week away from home gave me a great opportunity to navel-gaze free of distractions and to also interact offline with a number of old and new colleagues and this is content that I’ll be developing over the next week or so…

It’s been bucketing down here for most of the weekend since I got home but I have been making the most of breaks in the weather to do outside jobs at the Lodge and Chalet in preparation for the ski season which starts here in a couple of weeks. In the wetter parts of the days, I have had a full range of inside jobs as part of that prep and this has eaten into PC time quite a bit…tomorrow, I am off to Ohakea again and, assuming that the Army has finally completed all the exit admin, I should be a member of the RNZAF by lunch time…