It's all in the Marketing, or not
U.S. Needs to Devise a Different 'Brand' to Win Over the Iraqi People, Study Advises
Maybe if they called themselves “The Fluffy Bunny Liberation Brigade”?
Seriously. It’s not the brand; it’s the job. The US military is trained to fight and kill enemies using the maximum amount of available firepower. All well and good when you’re fighting another military force trained to fight the same way; not so good when trying to mount a counterinsurgency campaign.
In an urban insurgency, for example, civilians can help identify enemy infiltrators and otherwise assist U.S. forces. They are less likely to help, the study says, when they become "collateral damage" in U.S. attacks, have their doors broken down or are shot at checkpoints because they do not speak English. Cultural connections -- seeking out the local head man when entering a neighborhood, looking someone in the eye when offering a friendly wave -- are key.
And they only had to spend $400,000 to be told that, proving once again that consultants are highly paid people who tell you what you already know.
One other point at the bottom of the article:
Adversaries are doing their own shaping on Iraq's urban battlefields. While intimidation, coercion and assassination might not make them beloved, such techniques effectively limit public outreach to U.S. forces, the Rand study notes. Enemy forces have also learned that "doing good works is a classic approach to winning friends and influencing people" and frequently provide basic services that the U.S. military is unable to match.
$12,000,000,000 a month, and the US can’t match a bunch of mostly self-financed insurgents in the provision of basic services. Compared to that, $400 grand for stating the obvious doesn’t seem like that bad a deal.
