Theorists and military practitioners envision the chief problem in counterinsurgency to be the Identification Problem, which entails discerning enemy insurgents from among a population. Yet contemporary scholarship on civil wars as well as attentive readings of first-hand accounts of counterinsurgent forces in Iraq and Afghanistan reveal that another neglected but real challenge is the Positional Problem. Given that individual civilians and fighters as well as civilian populations and armed groups switch sides over time, the civil-war landscape resembles less of a bipolar struggle between two static sides and more as a contest between ever-changing alliance formations at multiple levels. Given these kaleidoscophic dynamics, counterinsurgents must decide how best to position their forces to accomplish their political leaders' aims; however, counterinsurgent leaders are not trained to resolve these positional problems. This argument has implications for just-war theory, military education, and civil-military relations.