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Notes -
According to a Canadian army officer I know, yes. He took a course during the post-Afghanistan years that was supposed to teach “strategic thinking”. One of their case studies was a problem that the US military faced: amid high unemployment in places like Karachi, Pakistani youths with nothing better to do were being recruited by the Taliban and crossing the mountainous border regions to kill American soldiers. How to solve this?
The obvious and favored course of action was to apply airpower and bomb the heck out of suspected tunnel areas and waypoints in the mountains with B52s. Cost: on the order of $100m - $1b. However, an alternative course of action that was considered took a PSYOPS angle: buy a few hundred generators and a few thousand Xboxes and set up free gaming centers around Karachi. The theory being, by distracting the youth with video games, they would be less likely to seek adventure and meaning by joining up with the Taliban. Cost: on the order of $1m - $10m.
The leadership at the time chose the former course of action. But several years later, the latter course of action is being studied by aspiring senior officers as a brilliant example of innovative and strategic thinking that could have saved a portion of the trouble of fighting a war.
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