Sending bullets, not men

As I was saying in "The captains' war," counterinsurgency can't succeed without trust. Needless to say, if you can't establish trust with a general in the Green Zone, you really can't establish trust with an A-10 pilot dropping bombs on your neighborhood. The increased dependence on "aerial counterinsurgency" is, like dependence on "private security firms," a natural outgrowth of not having enough of the right kind of forces for the mission in Iraq.