To be ready, I would suggest that the maintenance of a long-service professional force is the most essential ingredient. Those NATO partners who have delivered the best kinds of forces to the Afghan counter-insurgency have been those such as Canada, which maintains long-service professional forces. If you want to fight an insurgency, you need older, disciplined, experienced sergeants and mid-grade officers who can make decisions about how to make the kinds of personal connections to the population that enable you to understand the insurgent opposition, and who can protect and assist the people that you've gone there to assist.
Any counter-insurgency operation must essentially be an assistance mission to the nation that's at risk. Older, more mature junior leaders are essential to winning that kind of struggle. I think some of the recent news reports we've heard coming out of Afghanistan, with the difficulties that the Americans are encountering, reveal the problem of military forces raised for service in shorter periods of time.