Sometimes when studying something that has become too familiar to us, we can gain valuable new insights by looking at it from a radically different perspective. Much has been written, for example, about how important customer service is for business—so much, in fact, that it becomes easy to lose sight of the startlingly different forms that customer service can actually take. We can learn something important if we recognize the close relationship between customer service and its more violent little brother, counterinsurgency.

Counterinsurgency is the set of operations, both military and nonmilitary, that are conducted in support of a government that is under attack from an insurgency. An insurgency is an organized and violent attempt to destroy the legitimacy of a government. Insurgency and counterinsurgency are very different in practice; while insurgency depends heavily on guerrilla warfare, counterinsurgency depends on what we can recognize as customer service.

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