>>64173302
The two counter-insurgency archetypes of the time were Vietnam and British Malaya representing losing to Maoist style insurgents who gradually build up a conventional army to evict the rulers and winning by segregating the population and then killing off rural training camps. USA USA USA invented the third way. Speedrun killing insurgents.
Once you get a connect on some datapoint, raid that guy, rip his hard drives, plot his IPs, phone, family, money, friends, neighborhood, DNA, face and fingerprints; drop him with some interrogators and race to catch wherever any of those overlap before they can get a warning out. The faster you can connect everything up on a graph the faster you can go again.
Officially the idea was tracking back from WAMI, phones, or fingerprints on a IED to get the bomb maker (since we killed all the real fighters who tried traditional ambushes they started using expendable retards as cutouts) but for regular grunts what was visible was how many guys your platoon could scoop up from their beds before one of the insurgents' surveillance networks got the word out.
We could do about 4 raids a night before they did. This is regular infantry not cool guys. So you might go a month with nothing happening, then they try an ambush, or forensics pings off an IED, and you get a target. Then it's a race. Once you got everyone who could get got, which could take 2-3 days if you kept going, it was time to chilllax for a day before going back to regular patrols. A few weeks later you'd get a new lead from the intel guys who'd interrogated your prisoners and analyzed their computers and the race kicks off again.
Fun times desu.