David Galula's Four Laws Of Counterinsurgency

Of David Galula’s four “Laws of Counterinsurgency” or COIN, the first and fourth Laws support the U.S. COIN strategy in Afghanistan the most. These two laws strongly reflect the US COIN strategy in Afghanistan as outlined in both President Obama’s 2009 West Point speech and General Petraeus’s COMISAF COIN guidance because these laws are the ones focusing on the population and the efforts and means used in COIN operations.
General Stanley McChrystal, commander of the International Security Assistance Force, started out an eight part training video on the “8 Imperatives of COIN” with the statement “when we talk about COIN, we talk about it as a mission…but what we are really talking about is people.” In President Obama’s West Point speech in December 2009, he state’s that the “people and governments of both Afghanistan and Pakistan are endangered.” General David Petraeus, in his first update of his COMISAF’s Counterinsurgency Guidance, states “The people are the center of gravity.”
According to Galula, the first law is that “the support of the population is as necessary for the counterinsurgent as for the
President Obama acknowledged in his speech that General McChrystal needed more troops and the “status quo is not acceptable.” In recognition of this, President Obama authorizes an additional 30k troops in support of OEF. General Petraeus made a point in his guidance to state “fight hard and fight with discipline.”
The U.S. COIN strategy utilizes intensity of effort and vast resources that focuses on the overall goal for an improved way of life for the Afghan citizens free from the threat posed by Taliban insurgents. When looking back at the lessons learned from the COIN operations in Afghanistan, the problem was not identifying “what must be done, but rather in actually changing organizations and the ways they do