Kilcullen "Marathon" Post

Kilcullen "Marathon" Post at Small Wars Journal

At the SWJ blog, LTC Kilcullen has a good post on the "Baghdad Marathon." This was interesting in light of our recent discussion of victory and time in Iraq.

In comments to my post, Grim rightly pointed out that how long an "insurgency" last is sometimes a matter of opinion - depending on whether, say, you count intense IRA campaigns punctuated by years of peace (and preparation) as one long insurgency or a series of discrete ones (and whether you include those periods of preparation as part of the insurgency). I suggested that the most problematic groups in Iraq, "offensive" Sunni militias and AQIZ, couldn't afford to lengthen their lifespan by lying low for a while, because their ability to make Iraq look like a "failed state" relies on their ability to keep up the violence year after year, continuously from the beginning.

On that minor point, if Kilcullen is right, the enemy seems to agree with me:

"By shifting our approach away from directly hunting down insurgents, and towards protecting the population, we have undercut their influence – they know it, and their options are to flee, wait us out, or come into the open to contest control of the neighborhoods. The fact that some are coming into the open suggests they realize that waiting us out is not an option. It also makes the job of finding the enemy far easier. This is encouraging, as long as we can protect the people."

That doesn't give me hope for quick victory - and the title of his post, "The Iraq Marathon," suggests that it doesn't do that for him either. I still think 15 years is more realistic than 5. (And I still welcome thoughts on improving my estimate.)