Quote Originally Posted by TROUFION View Post
You can be more than one thing. You can be an expert in conventional and unconventional war. Officers and senior enlisted of high caliber and flexible mindset are what is needed. In the Marine Corps we have legendary leaders who started out in irregular conflicts and rose to great success in conventional wars. Smedley Butler, Chesty Puller, Dan Daily, to name but a few. Warfighting can be complicated but it is not so difficult that it cannot be understood on its many levels.
Yes, and one of the interesting thing about the Marines is that they have been able to strike that balance. I'm not sure what it is about the Army as an institution that has made them unable (or unwilling) to do so with any great regularity. It's not so much a question of size (as this is something I've seen going back to when the Army's main business was more or less constabulary in nature) as it may be the culture and learned behaviors within the organization.

This isn't a dig at the Army as much as it is me musing out loud (or at the keyboard) about something that has come to interest and puzzle me more and more of late. I'll stop now before I ramble out of control...