Posted by John T.
Agree we don't do lessons learned well, the lessons we adapt are generally ephemeral in nature. Since each conflict is different the ephemeral nature of the lessons is acceptable, but as you pointed out in your study many lessons are in fact enduring, and forgetting those is inexcusable.What you are pointing out is the fact the the Army does a good job of recording lessons and a poor job of learning them. We even record them in doctrine. If you look at the various iterations of Operations (100-5 and 3-0) and those focused on small wars and COIN, you will find all the lessons of wars that date from the Indian campaigns to the present recorded and published. But, you will also find those key lessons disappear as bigger, more conventional wars intervene. So, we tend to have to re-learn old lessons each time we encounter analogous situations.
With the Marines is hard to separate their propaganda from fact, of all the services they are the best at projecting and protecting an image. Credit is still due to their generally superior performance in Small Wars over time, though it would be hard to make a case this is true in Afghanistan. There have been both exceptional and flawed Army and Marine units in this conflict, but after 10 years of conflict we should anticipate both organizations to learn and adapt. In general they have more aggressive officers, have a smaller footprint, they're better organized for this type of mission, generally not an occupation force (thoughout history), more willing to accept risk, etc.Our Marine brothers seem to have done better. Perhaps, it is due tho their expeditionary culture. In any case, they seem to have remembered more from the Small Wars Manual than the Army did of its earlier small wars experiences.
Maybe, but the “clear, hold, build approach” is really a nation building approach (the way we do it). It isn’t focused on defeating the insurgency, but building the economy while the insurgents are held at bay. It is a deeply flawed approach in my view, and in fact we don't do the clear well to begin with. We jump right into the build phase with the American Power theory that if we spend more we’ll win, so we throw millions of dollars away (many of them directly to the insurgents, since they do in fact collect taxes). We close our eyes to the fact that the insurgents still run the show in areas we claim to have cleared. Our clear phase is focused on the overt guerrillas (our conventional approach to an unconventional conflict), not removing the insurgent infrastructure. Battle space owners are almost totally focused on nation building and pursuing the IED network, they seem to forget their is a shadow government (often hanging out in the sunlight), propagandists, financiers, etc.). We may actually pull this off in Afghanistan, but it won't be based on our skill, rather the Afghan people rising up to defeat the Taliban despite our many mis-steps.Bill M. I have to take exception to the argument you made with respect to 3-24. Most of the lessons in 3-24 are, in fact, old lessons found in earleier editions of 100-5 and 100-20 and were applied successfully in many COIN campaigns. They were alos recorded in non-doctrinal books dating back to C. E. Callwell's Small Wars, Sir Robert Thompson's Defeating Communist Insurgency, Sir Frank Kitson's Low Intensity Operations, my (with Max Manwaring) Uncomfortable Wars Revisted, and David Kilcullen's the Accidental Guerrilla.
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