This is a non-issue of a story. Normal cyclical review of doctrine.
I feel the article author was trying to show that this piece of doctrine can be applied in a large variety of scenarios, which is the point, no one has time to write, read, and train for all the different type of insurgency, so a single source document makes a lot of sense.
Right on page four, it has a pictorial of COIN being the gap between peace support (something like Cyprus) and major combat operations (Ukraine) with overlap. Something like Haiti would fall under a peace support / COIN overlap, something like 2019 Ukraine the COIN/War overlap. This publication needs to cover ALL of that.
The document came out of some hard earned lessons in Afghanistan, but all doctrine should be reviewed periodically regardless.
You’re not wrong about the review being a non-story, but it’s still messed up that the military would be thinking about directly fighting labour unrest and similar.
The military is not considering fighting labour unrest or similar. Disruption of labour is just listed as an insurgent tactic.
There is zero mentions of fighting labour unrest, or similar, directly. That runs counter to an overarching COIN principal of involving the local populace in the campaign.
The article author very carefully selected three paragraphs from a 300 page document, expanded on them, and tried to lead the reader to the conclusion you came to.
Hmm, that deceptive huh? I guess I’ll actually have to read the doctrine.