Spencer, you should recognize this pattern from Iraq: the enemy uses technology far more effectively than our government does

Er…. no. Effective use wouldn’t have included use of mass casualty attacks to alienate themselves from their support base whice pretty much resulted in them using their own knives to slit their own throats in Iraq.

Put into terms I unfortunately picked up from Alvin Toffler, the U.S. government is a big, inflexible, industrial, “Second Wave” beast, while Al-Qaeda is a small, networked, highly flexible, “Third Wave” organization, and in terms of organization remarkably superior.

This is why even refocusing on COIN at the division level won’t really address terrorism. Insurgency is not our “real” problem, yet institutional changes are the last off the drawing table. (As one example, we’ve been talking about ’social network effects’ and “effects based operations’ since at least the early 80s, yet it takes until years after we invade Iraq and Afghanistan for these ideas to make their ways into planning — the government itself is just fundamentally mis-structured to address new security concerns.)