Water Holes amd Drowning Horses
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Nat Wilcox
Tom, a question. When you say "senior leaders," who do you mean, exactly? The reason I ask is that one of the "stories" we civvies hear in some of the media is that (to some extent) the senior civilian leadership took a long time to decide that an active COIN approach was necessary. In this "narrative" of recent events, civilian leadership putting Petraeus in charge allowed your platoon and company leaders to really do what they knew needed doing a long time ago--not simply to the extent they could on their own initiative, but in an integrated and whole-hearted way, which is (probably) a lot more effective overall. But this narrative also lets senior military leadership "off the hook" so to speak: It places the blame with the secretary of defense and the rest of the administration.
I am sure that as with most things, it is a mixture of the two so don't exclude the middle if that is the right answer. Anyway I am curious how y'all see this.
Nat,
My definition of senior leader these days really starts with the brigade commanders at full colonel for that is where they really start to have the flexibility to adapt or demonstrate their inability to do so.
I would agree on the inability of the senior civilian leaders to recognize an insurgency when senior military leaders were saying one was afoot, notabaly Abizaid and later Pace.
John T
Agreed on the mulutiple watering holes. I have used that analogy myself, trying to give the horse the choice between drinking or drowning. I had a young man in my office the other day and he was looking at the books after announcing he was there to see "the CALL stuff." He would pull something off the shelf and then put it back. Finally my NCO asked him if he was looking for something in particular, He said, "No. I don't put much stock in this written stuff. I just get out there and do..."
He left moments later and after confirming with my sergeant that I had heard what I thought I had heard, I told him, "That young man clearly prefers to learn by making mistakes, hopefully they won't get him or his soldiers killed."
Some horses just drown.
Tom
Mars Learning, as it were
This is one of the examples I like to use of the Army NOT repeating Vietnam-era institutional mistakes. During that war there was precious little information flowing from the combat zone back to training areas (except for some "search the village" courses and smaller things) until late in the war. This time around they're avoiding that mistake and making tons of good information available. Now if they'd just avoid the same sort of personnel mistakes we'd be that much more to the good.
Levers or Mechanisms of adaptation
While deployed I saw 3 different BCTs rotate through Mosul. What I noticed was that with each new unit, the flash to bang cycle on adaptation was shrotened. It seemed to go beyond CDR personality. The only rational reason I believe is the CTCs, CALL, veteran leadership and the rest of the loop which captures the lessons of the operational environment and feeds them into the training cycle. If ever there has been validation for this method and the resources which sustain it, I believe this would be it. It really got me thinking about how we change/adapt.
Its interesting also that some of the things we use to drive future requirements are being updated with operational experience. It is pretty dynamic. One of the big friction point seems to lie in programatic evaluation of relevancy and redirection. Another is the debate on organizational structure.