John Bernard, a 26-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) who blogs at Let Them Fight or Bring Them Home!, comes from a noble family of warriors committed to the USMC, and the defense of the American ideal. John was writing, generically, about the dangerous (i.e., to our troops!) shortcomings of the Rules of Engagement (ROE) in Afghanistan, attempting to alert both our military and political leadership before his own Marine son, Joshua, was tragically KIA in Dahaneh, Afghanistan.

The confluence of decades of academic socialist indoctrination, the watering down of the truth of Islam, the tearing down of the American ideal and the decision to use operatives from the Muslim Brotherhood as advisors conspired to insure we would fail at this juncture of the planning phase of the war. And this has colored our entire understanding of how and when we should engage this enemy.

Once the order was written, with it's faulty assessment, it was all but inevitable that something like the 80 year old doctrine of Counter Insurgency (COIN) would be hauled out, dusted off and re-tooled to govern our actions against an enemy who had been so hopelessly, falsely assessed.

Now for the damning statement that unhinges all who in their gut sense something is wrong; the Rules of Engagement, which I have made the case are directly attributable to all of the deaths of our American Warriors, are precisely correct. They are precisely correct if you are fighting within the paradigm of Counter Insurgency Doctrine. The question then, is not how to change the ROE, rather it is whether or not COIN is the right strategy under which to conduct combat operations against this enemy, in this country.

And the answer is a resounding, no!