Lessons Observed on Lessons Observed
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.
