My reaction to Gen. Petraeus's dissertation...
Hi everyone,
I think this would be the right place to post a thread regarding history, since this is my reaction to reading Gen. Petraeus's dissertation so far, which explores the use of military force in the Vietnam war. I'm only on the first part of it, which explores how the Korean war influenced the thinking of senior military leaders in the Vietnam war.
First off, it is insightful and refreshing to read a scholarly work that is outside the typical liberalism of academia. I've been learning how traumatic isolated land conflicts were to the esteem of American forces caught up in them. The trauma then becomes a part of the collective memory the armed forces, internalized even by those who did not experience them directly, according to Petraeus. Not just the military, but other institutions have memories that define them.
The literature I have read for school talks about how museums, libraries and archives have insituitional memory as well. But never in my entire academic career have I heard the words "military" and "institutional" memory together in the same sentence. Yes, a lot of the anti-war protesters had trauma in their lives during the 60s, and many, no doubt, became the liberal professors in universities today, but through Gen. Petraeus's work, I have learned there is another side to the story. That is the trauma internalized by the senior military leaders who became cautious, if not indecisive, unless they were fighting conflicts they were positive they could win.
I think the reason why senior military leaders were hesitant to use counter-insurgency/unconventional war back when the invasion of Iraq first began, was due to painful memories still left over from Vietnam. Gen. Petraeus describes the inclination of "an all or nothing victory" in warfare as a reaction to avoiding another Vietnam. That might be why the US first went in with the heavy artillery and tanks back in 2003/4.
I am still studying the effects of Vietnam on US culture and Iraq today in this series on global conflict. I do not know as much as someone who lived through Vietnam, because I was not even born then. I am trying to understand the perspective of my professors, as well as my parents' generation as a whole. To me, it is 9/11 that holds real significance. Gen. Petraeus said that if an individual experiences a traumatic event in their formative years, then it impacts their psyche deeply throughout life.
I was studying at the University of Hawaii when 9/11 happened. I saw my fellow students cry at a candlelight vigil held in the dorms that day, when they discovered some of their loved ones had died in the World Trade Center. Even now, as they shed their tears, reciting the Lord's Prayer, their pain as fellow students of my generation is burned into my memory. I felt helplessness, pain and anger at those who attacked America. I saw that Waikiki was completely empty and tourists were stranded in Hawaii. Commerce in Hawaii was completely dead. No airplanes flew after 9/11 hitting Hawaii hard, as it is an island. Those were the firsthand effects of terrorism I experienced in my formative years, in Hawaii.
I can only imagine that is what my parents' generation experienced in Vietnam. About 1 month ago, when I mentioned being an Army civilian at a local coffee shop where I live, this man in his 60s got so angry at me, when he heard the word "army," and nearly yelled at me, I was guessing because it was anger at the Vietnam war. He didn't understand 9/11 is to my generation, what Vietnam was to his. I could mention many reactions I had while reading Gen. Petraeus's dissertation, but I thought I would share what I felt.
Naomi
institutions as incentives
I thought I would respond at length to this thoughtful post. You see, I was an 25th Infantry (Hawaii's own) platoon sergeant during the 1968 Tet Offense that came in the middle of the first 'long war'. Later I went to college and went back to Asia with USAID and the UN. I have lived in Asia (and some in Africa) ever since I left the East West Center in Honolulu in 1981. I just finished 3 years with the UN in Afghanistan and am now in Pakistan. I guess Petreaus is right, trauma early in life stays with you. ;-)
Institutions are not libraries, but are understood formally as complex configurations of formal and informal rules, beliefs and attitudes that evolve over time to influence human behavior. A review of the literature of New Institutional Economics (Douglass North is the godfather of the doctrine) and complexity science (see Mitchell Waldrop's early (1992) history of this scientific discipline) are both fundamental to understanding the distinction between institutions as the rules of the game and organizations (like the Senate, Army, and libraries) as the players. However, institutions (as social incentive structures) are conservative forces that support the status quo and change slowly (see North's work for about 8,000 years of evidence). Understanding institutions as socio-cognitive incentive structures is critical to understanding how societies, organizations and individuals learn.
The Army is an organization with an internal set of incentives, deeply embedded in the larger American institutional context, that have a tremendous influence on soldiers. No one wants to die or to be labeled a loser for not following a winning approach. Before Vietnam, America had NEVER lost so the lessons learned were easy to track and deemed to be universally applicable. Today's Army has a modern knowledge management system that effectively translates lessons learned into doctrine. The lesson in the failure of Gen McKiernan to adapt to the new COIN doctrine in Afghanistan is less a failing of an old soldier who couldn't learn than a recognition of the time it takes for social incentive structures to change in any organization so that doctrine can be consistently translated into strategy and tactics (human behavior).
On a higher level, contrasting the impact of Vietnam and 9/11 on American institutions provides an interesting case. Not all trauma are alike, certainly not in their long-term effects. Vietnam dominated life in America for 10 years, but its lasting impact has been far different from that of 9/11 (but somewhat similar to that of Iraq). The Vietnam experience undermined long-standing institutions and led to the decine in public confidence in the government and the Army. Vietnam pitted Americans against Americans more intensely than anytime since the Civil War. In contrast, 9/11 was a cathartic experience, more akin to Pearl Harbor, that actually served, for a time, to bring most Americans together, but it also galvanized a form of neocon patriotism that strengthened government control over the lives of citizens.
Now, if you have read this far, please tell me how I can get a copy of Petreaus's dissertation.
Aloha,
Paul
Naomi, I wouldn't necessarily assume
that the "jerk" you talked to was a Vietnam vet (not that you did but Schmedlap thought you did). He certainly was traumatized by something about the Army and Vietnam. That said, Schmedlap is right that most Vietnam vets went about their business without a lot of trauma (as did most of the protesters of the war).
While Vietnam did shape American attitudes and the attitudes of a generation of military officers it was not the cause of the preference for conventional warfare; it merely reinforced that peference. Rmember that the American military has spent most of its history fighting small wars. From the American Revolution on, we have fought only 9 predominantly conventional wars by my count - less by some others. And those all had significant small wars going on inside the big wars. Interestingly, a big war seems to come along once in every generation which allows the military as an institution to justify its determination to prpare for those wars and ignore the small wars that we always have to fight.
The most articulate current spokesman for the big war point of view is COL Gian Gentile who writes here a lot - mostly debating John Nagl (and many of the rest of us.)
Cheers
JohnT
Not sure precisely what Pakphile meant but
I am sure that his statement is correct. "...the time it takes for social incentive structures to change in any organization so that doctrine can be consistently translated into strategy and tactics (human behavior)." is always a problem -- and that really amounts to "failure to adapt to a doctrine." In this particular case it is because the 'doctrine' has to overcome more than 30 years of inertia, fight a bureaucracy that is inimical to that doctrine, force change to deeply embedded training and education practices and is not accepted as totally correct by many in the institution to whom the doctrine nominally belongs.
In other words, there are a lot of people fighting the problem instead of the supposed enemy...
We need to get over the myth that COIN and allied efforts are exotic efforts requiring special training, education, practices or people. It is simply a part of the job. A part we elected to ignore for years because it's dirty work; more importantly to that neglect, it's also tedious work and does not provide instant feedback (bad ju-ju for impatient Americans who like quick results...). Effective training will produce people competent -- and willing -- to do what the job requires.