Lessons Observed on Lessons Observed: IEDs, Advising, and Armor by Jason Fritz, War on the Rocks - BLUF:
There has been a push in some circles, certainly not in these pages, to ignore the past 10 years of war as an anomaly not to be repeated. We had a similar reaction to the Vietnam War and yet found ourselves in similar circumstances, still learning the same lessons. It is incumbent upon the civilian and military leadership of the Department of Defense to learn from our experience this time around, understand those lessons, and use those lessons to change our behavior in the next war, not to fight the Iraq or Afghanistan war again. As we continue the debates over what our forces look like, how they are equipped, and how they are trained, it seems that we should assess the lessons we have observed from these wars and others and ensure that we set our forces up for success in the future. We greatly wasted the 20 years between Vietnam and our contemporary wars and we cannot afford to do so again. Budgets are important and money is finite, but the lives of the troops are more finite and we owe it to them to truly learn the lessons of the past.
Comments
Clausewitz expresses it clearly:
"Activity in War is movement in a resistant medium. Just as a man immersed in water is unable to perform with ease and regularity the most natural and simplest movement, that of walking, so in War, with ordinary powers, one cannot keep even the line of mediocrity. This is the reason that the correct theorist is like a swimming master, who teaches on dry land movements which are required in the water, which must appear grotesque and ludicrous to those who forget about the water. This is also why theorists, who have never plunged in themselves, or who cannot deduce any generalities from their experience, are unpractical and even absurd, because they only teach what every one knows—how to walk"
Personal experience is the best. Those without have a clear and obvious disadvantage - especially to the enemy.
With Iraq and Afghanistan can there be any reason - or excuse? - for any serving officer to have missed exposure to combat to learn the lessons first hand?
Looking to downsize the military? Start with those who managed to never "get their feet wet".
Grant, in this we agree completely. My work is certainly not designed as a prescriptive Jominian list (though his list is a great guide for COA comparison and analysis at the tactical level); rather it is to explore intrastate, populace-based conflicts in much the same manner that CvC explored interstate warfare. It rests upon his work, and seeks to address what I perceive as a gap. It keeps me busy, but it does tend to irritate those who see Clausewitz as the comprehensive guide to all forms of human conflict.
I just refuse to accept that every insurgency is a "come as you are" party where one must show up, F-up, and lose. I believe there is a framework of stategic undertanding that we can derive from the relative certainty of human nature; and then tailor for purpose with the unique factors of culture, history, geography, politics, etc, etc for the place in question. The first is critical for good strategy, the second for good tactics. We now tend to have neither and only think the second is important. I disagree. And our loses are for lack of effective strategic context, not for want of tactical action.
Best,
Bob
Why- if we are true professionals and supposedly critical thinkers- should we assume that we can "learn" lessons from past engagements and apply those lessons in the future? It seems to me there is a lot more rigorous theoretical literature backing the idea that social phenomena are unique in time and space- and lessons "learned" from past experience cannot be applied to future situations. This seems to be intuitive - although still hard to follow- when talking country to country, but is arguably also applicable to the same country when talking about different time frames.
This does not even touch on the problems of "learning" in general- how institutions learn and the supposition that institutions- even individuals- can learn objectively. Again, it would be very interesting to see what other disciplines outside of the military say about "learning"- especially when applied to social activity. The idea being that one can run a scientific experiment (and thus "learn") on, say, the effect of free health care on ER visits, but not so much on whether FM 3-24 tactics and subsequent strategy would have been successful in Vietnam - or later in Afghanistan. There is no control group and it is impossible to replicate the conditions from country to country and from time period to time period. Thus, learning is subjective: based on the context of the time, not to mention all the politics involved.
Just reading Blond Ghost by David Corn. It's about Ted Shackley, the guy who ran CIA ops around Indochina in the 60's and early 70's including the last days of South Vietnam. In the last days of that conflict, CIA folks were lamenting about how there had been years of uncorrected corruption and malfeasance in the South Vietnamese army and government and how local conditions were consistently being reported in official U. S. channels as being more positive than they really were. Few CIA (and from my experience, military) personnel were willing to kill their own careers by being nay-sayers while all around them were being "forward-leaning," can-do cheerleaders. Some of those regretting voices were saying they hoped the lesson had been learned and that such mistakes would not be repeated in the future. How sad, how frustrating that those lessons were merely observed, not learned.
David Donovan