Also, I'm not suggesting one school is always right and the other always wrong - both can be well-done, and both can be hopelessly counterproductive if done badly. (Note that we're talking about classical counter-insurgency theory here, not modern counter-insurgency practice, so much. Again, there are many variants within this approach, including some very hard-line methods and some softer approaches, but the underlying philosophy is 'first control the population, and all else will follow'. It believes that establishing control over the population, and the environment (physical, human and informational) in which that population lives, is the essential task. The population-centric approach understands counter-insurgency as fundamentally a control problem, or even an armed variant of government administration. In a nut-shell, it could be summarized as 'first defeat the enemy, and all else will follow'. Many of these strategic concepts are shared with the population-centric school of counterinsurgency, but the philosophy differs. There are many variants within this approach, including 'soft line' and 'hard line' approaches, kinetic and non-kinetic methods of defeating the enemy, decapitation versus marginalization strategies, and so on. It sees counterinsurgency as a contest with an organized enemy, and believes that we must defeat that enemy as our primary task. The enemy-centric approach basically understands counter-insurgency as a variant of conventional warfare. These two contrasting schools of thought about counterinsurgency might be labeled as 'enemy-centric' and 'population-centric'. So it may be worth sketching in brief outline the two basic philosophical approaches to counterinsurgency that developed over the 20th century (a period which I have written about elsewhere as 'Classical Counterinsurgency').

Discussion of the new Iraq strategy, and General Petraeus's recent Congressional testimony have raised the somewhat obvious point that the word 'counterinsurgency' means very different things to different people.

Squad vs insurgency