Luttwak offers two solutions in his Harper's article:

1) Engage in a campaign of terror, directed at local authority, and up to and including mass executions, to generate compliance to a totalitarian occupier.

2) Create an occupational government consisting of military rule, supplanting any local authority, so as to be able to control the situation and use a more carrot approach than 1).

He then asserts that it is the ambivalence of Americans to occupying and governing that causes us to lose counterinsurgency efforts.

In other words, he is calling for a surge of enormous proportions, or brutality that hasn't been seen since the Geneva Conventions (his examples, the Ottoman Empire, the Roman Empire, and Nazi Germany, are all either pre-Geneva, or massive Geneva violators).

Petraeus' and Mattis' field manual, by contrast, is arguing for a flexible, adapt to the population, strategy to win over the local populations. Its plus and minus points are as follows:

Plus:

• Emphasize intelligence.

• Focus on the population, their needs, and security.

• Establish and expand secure areas.

• Isolate insurgents from the population (population control).

• Appoint a single authority, usually a dynamic, charismatic leader.

• Conduct effective, pervasive psychological operations.

• Provide amnesty and rehabilitation for insurgents.

• Place police in the lead with military support.

• Expand and diversify the police force.

• Train military forces to conduct counterinsurgency operations.

• Embed special operations forces and advisors with indigenous forces.

• Deny the insurgents sanctuary.

Minus:

• Place priority on killing and capturing the enemy, not on engaging the population.

• Conduct battalion-sized operations as the norm.

• Concentrate military forces in large bases for protection.

• Focus special operations forces primarily on raiding.

• Place a low priority on assigning quality advisors to host-nation forces.

• Build and train host-nation security forces in the of the U.S. Army’s image.

• Ignore peacetime government processes, including legal procedures.

• Allow open borders, airspace, and coastlines.

The counterinsurgency strategies they put forth are sound, and reflect experience in the field. The problem is that these should have been practiced when they first got there, and few people were doing so (these two were among them). Not the least of the reasons for this was that there was an official policy that did not allow anyone to call it an insurgency.

The problem with counterinsurgency in general is that at the beginning and probably most of the way through, it is essentially an unstable solution to a problem. That means that any deviation, any mistake, any stroke of bad luck tends to amplify and spin out of control. It requires a completely different type of training from the I'm-the-baddest-SOB-on-the-block style that characterizes the action film version of fighting, and characterized many actions in Iraq early in this war. So it is a terrific uphill battle, has tons of chance of failure, is expensive and requires the utmost forebearance of the American troops, AND requires learning local language and customs, being flexible, building local infrastructure while getting one's ass shot off, etc.,etc. Given the current administration, it's also a moonshot with mission control on vacation.

This whole war has been an exercise in denying the truth, since before it started, to the present. A strategy that requires facing the truth 24x7, and reigning in some of the strongest instincts of the species, not to mention having 150,000 people start learning languages and customs, is, to be fair, probably the only thing that would work if you could implement it. The real criticism of Petraeus and Matthis is whether their strategy is practical, given that we lost the opportunity to apply it in a timely fashion because of those who would not admit reality, or whether this war is already lost.

It should reflect on those who took us to war that they not only took us to war for specious reasons, they took us into a situation with only an unstable solution. Given the inevitable difficulty that then ensued, we should have seen a pretty damn good reason for all this, and we never did. So we lost. I personally don't see how we get out of this without a period of chaos, an international peacekeeping effort, reparations, and war crimes trials.

The plus and minus points are from the field manual that Luttwak cites, written by Petraeus and Matthis.