’10 Years Of Abject Failure’: Army, SOCOM, Marine Leaders Focus On ‘Strategic Landpower’
’10 Years Of Abject Failure’: Army, SOCOM, Marine Leaders Focus On ‘Strategic Landpower’ – Sydney J. Freedberg, Jr., Breaking Defense.
… Destroying a particular target is a complicated but solvable problem of physics. Defeating a formal unit is a more complex but well-studied question of military art. It’s massively more complex — a “wicked problem” — to anticipate the reactions of an entire society, or even understanding them swiftly enough to realize what’s happening, such as an insurgency, before it’s too late.
Strategically, that failure to understand the human factor is the root of the “abject failure” that the Army, Marines, and SOCOM are determined not to repeat. Politically, because humans live on land and are best understood through face-to-face interaction with other humans on the ground, emphasizing human factors is central to the argument that ground forces remain relevant. And institutionally for Special Operations, which is all about face-to-face interaction with foreigners, it would be a big boost in status to have formal, doctrinal recognition that there is a “human domain” of war…
