sweep and destroy

Celtic Trinity Knot

The key to understanding our wars: the trinity of COIN.

By / Leave a Comment / 2 March 2019

Summary:  Most of our wars since Korea have been counter-insurgencies (COIN), in which we employ a trinity of methods — firepower, mobility, and militia. It doesn’t work for us, or for any foreign armies doing COIN. Today we review the trinity and why it fails, and ask the more important question of why we don’t …

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The trinity of modern warfare at work in Afghanistan

By / 19 Comments / 18 March 2015

Clausewitz spoke of a trinity of the people, the government, and the military.  The rise to dominance of fourth generation warfare has made this conceptually useless, providing only a perspective from which to see how the world has changed.  During the past 60 years a new trinity of modern war has emerged for armies fighting in foreign lands.  Chet Richards …

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