Foreign Internal Defense

Foreign internal defense (FID) is a term used by a number of Western militaries, including the United States, France and the United Kingdom, to describe an approach to combating actual or threatened insurgency in a foreign state called the Host Nation (HN). The term counter-insurgency is more commonly used worldwide than FID. FID involves military deployment of counter-insurgency specialists. According to the US doctrinal manual, Joint Publication 3-07.1: Foreign Internal Defense (FID), those specialists preferably do not themselves fight the insurgents. Doctrine calls for a close working relationship between the HN government and military with outside military, diplomatic, economic, and other specialists. The most successful FID actions prevent actual violence, although that is rarely possible. When combat is needed, it is best done by HN personnel with appropriate external support, the external support preferably being in a noncombat support and training role alone.

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Read more about Foreign Internal Defense:  Definition, Effective FID and Partnership, Participants in FID Programs, FID Models, National Problems and Transnational Spillover, Nonmilitary Actions in Closing Gaps, FID Operations, Indirect Military Support Operations, Direct Military Support Not Involving Combat Operations, Direct Combat Role, History

Famous quotes containing the words foreign, internal and/or defense:

    “You can’t appreciate home till you’ve left it, money till it’s spent, your wife till she’s joined a woman’s club, nor Old Glory till you see it hanging on a broomstick on the shanty of a consul in a foreign town.”
    —O. Henry [William Sydney Porter] (1862–1910)

    “A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy.”
    —Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)

    “He said, truly, that the reason why such greatly superior numbers quailed before him was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they lacked a cause,—a kind of armor which he and his party never lacked. When the time came, few men were found willing to lay down their lives in defense of what they knew to be wrong; they did not like that this should be their last act in this world.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)