Drawing the Right Lessons

Andrew Exum, King’s College Ph.D. candidate and former Army officer with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, has an excellent article in the Combating Terrorism Center’s Sentinel – Drawing the Right Lessons from Israel’s War with Hizb Allah.

… It is impossible to gauge the degree to which the U.S. Army’s conventional combat skills have been eroded by the focus on counter-insurgency warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is certainly likely that the high operations tempo, endless deployments and shortened training schedules have more to do with any erosion in collective task proficiencies than counter-insurgency manual FM 3-24. Yet, the U.S. military is almost certainly drawing the wrong lessons from the 2006 war if it is used to ignore the hard won lessons of counter-insurgency and revert back to the kind of conventional war-fighting with which the U.S. military has always been more comfortable.

Drawing the wrong lessons has happened before…

Again, excellent article and well worth the read.