They say that intellectual history travels slowly, and by hearse. The old generation has to die off before a new set of convictions can rise and replace entrenched ways of thinking. People also say that a large organization is like an aircraft carrier. You can move the rudder, but it still takes a long time to turn it around.
Yet we have a counterexample right in front of us. Five years ago, the United States Army was one sort of organization, with a certain mentality. Today, it is a different organization, with a different mentality. It has been transformed in the virtual flash of an eye, and the story of that transformation is fascinating for anybody interested in the flow of ideas.
Gen. David Petraeus, who had an important role, spoke about the transformation while accepting the Irving Kristol Award Thursday night from the American Enterprise Institute. I spoke to him and others about the process this week.
The transformation began amid failure. The U.S. was getting beaten in Iraq in 2004 and 2005. Captains and colonels were generally the first to see this, but only a few knew how to respond. Those who did tended to have dual personalities. That is, they had been steeped in Army culture but also in some other, often academic, culture. Petraeus had written a dissertation on Vietnam at Princeton. H.R. McMaster, then a colonel, had also written a book on Vietnam. Others were autodidacts and had studied the counterinsurgency tactics that had been used in Malaysia, Algeria and El Salvador...
More at The New York Times.
Comments
Between 1976 and 1982 over 110 articles were published in Military Review that fundamentally challenged and critically probed at the Army's current operational doctrine at that time: Active Defense.
The notion as put forward in Dave Kilcullen's new book and by some senior army officers that FM 3-24 was widely debated in the army is simply just flat wrong. It was not, the Army was (and still is) too busy. In no way has the Army as an institutional and field force had the kind of debate that we had in the late 70s and early 80s over Active Defense. The façade that it has is nothing more than further evidence of the power of the Coin Learning and Adapting Paradigm.
We need to start a wide ranging debate because our Counterinsurgency doctrine as written down in FM 3-24 is broken and it continues to delude the Army as to the promise of its effectiveness. More importantly the Armys straightjacket understanding of Population Centric Counterinsurgency continues to act as a shovel throwing dirt onto the grave of Strategy.