The barriers between the nation-state and the private sector (a sector which the state both governs and depends on) are as porous and shifting as lines drawn in sand. It is no inconvenience for the military to relinquish power to Halliburton -- or, more accurately, to share power -- because the boundary between the two is negotiable, contextual, and constantly changing.

An understanding of the infrastructures that COIN seeks to strengthen and employ is not advanced by any binary that opposes the nation-state to a non-state "other" (whether privately held businesses or global, extra-national entities such as WTO or the World Bank). Consequently, any useful critique or strategy for dealing with these propositions is unlikely to come from such binaries.

I think Saskia Sassen's analysis, in her book Territory, Authority, Rights, will get us much farther than the binaries you quote from Wendy Brown and that you tacitly embrace in your closing comment.

Sassen, a sociologist who pioneered the discussion of "the global city," understands these new "assemblages" of power as multi-scalar phenomena that employ aspects of the nation-state to enlist extra-national powers -- the local and personal as much as the global or institutional-- so that the whole pursues a set of interests that isn't merely national. What the COIN manual outlines, with its local on-the-ground social/cultural strategies wed to its global, extra-national business alliances, is such an assemblage. The forces of COIN are a great step ahead if they recognize the multi-scalar realities of post-national power and their critics do not.

However, Sassen sees some good news here. If the opponents of COIN-style "assemblages" stop seeing the state as their enemy, but recognize the usefulness of its instruments in concert with increasingly networked trans-national grassroots efforts, their might be hope for a competing new assemblage, one that can "garrison defective territories" for other, more promising purposes.

A nuanced understanding like Sassen's could get us to the brink of optimism about the resources we already have that can be used to counter COIN. I think those include the national government, under new leadership.

It's what happens when control of the body politic is handed over to the companies that sell bullets. You may as well let the grave-digger's union decide what's the best course to pursue -- the conflict of interest is the same.

And I thought SLOG posters were strange - if those are the kind of letters Charles gets, I can see why he doesn't get riled up by what gets posted here ...