Rob,
What was most annoying about my keyboard is that it did not share
(I have been trying to get the 'blue quote' thing to work but I give up)
from a question Rob asked TT and Marc - 'The last event, if dramatic enough, seems to shape the rest of an individual experience and becomes sort of Rosetta Stone or lens through which all lesser experiences are viewed until some other experience of equal weight is encountered. Its a natural bias which must be guarded against in order to look forward (at future problems) with objectivity.
I think your observation is spot on. To take this point onwards....
A very solid argument can be made, I think, that WWII, the ‘Good War’, provides the foundation for how the modern US military (well, not so much the USAF, ‘cause it did not exist during that conflict) sees itself and what it does. To grossly oversimplify, as each US service sees itself in a different way, WWII is in essence the last war that the ‘generals’ want to fight better (as opposed to the last battle). This form of warfare, state vs state, division vs division, has been, and to a degree remains today, the focus of the US military in spite of the many small wars it has engaged in since 1945, with the US military steadily refining and becoming ever more proficient in the form of warfare they fought in WWII.
This emphasis is partly reinforced and indeed propagated by the icons of each service. In the ‘Who are the Great Generals’ thread, I was struck by the fact that most – but certainly not all -- of the Generals named were those who commanded ‘conventional’ style wars (from Alexander to the present). I understand that the intent – particularly by the members of the SWB – is to identify Generals who exemplify the many leadership skills and attributes that are required of a good officer whatever the form of warfare. These men – and the few women mentioned – certainly do serve as role models. As such, however, the connection between their iconic status and the form of warfare on which their status is based carries a strong connotation or meaning about what is 'proper war', about what is the form of warfare that should be aspired to. Or to put it another way, such role models, consciously or unconsciously, reinforce ‘who we are’ and ‘what we do’, and the 'what we do' in many of the examples put forward is ‘conventional warfare’.
wm in his post on the ‘Generals’ thread titled ‘The "Greats" & America's Infatuation with Technology’, made what I think is a very astute observation. His observation was, ‘Maybe if we chose a different set of icons for our WWII heroes, we might find a better set of solutions for the current morass in which we find ourselves enmired.’ This is, wm, excellent advice.
Certainly the great Generals should be iconic symbols, but it seems to me that there is real need develop a new set of ‘iconic’ leaders, to elevate the many US military personnel from through out US history who demonstrated the same leadership skills and attributes as the ‘great generals’ but in small wars. A hard reality is that such potential ‘iconic’ officers would not make a Great Generals list, for many if not most of the officers you would be looking for would not have been Generals at the time and many, if not most, very likely never made it up the ladder to ‘General’ (or Admiral). So one way to try to forestall the ‘stagnation you raise, the US military should (to contribute to changing the ‘narrative’) is pillage through its history (and as small wars are largely on land, this means mostly the history of Army and Marine Corps) to find and rehabilitate those officers, whatever their rank, who engaged in small wars to provide modern day role models of leaderships to sit alongside .
Just as a brief example Chesty Puller was mentioned several times as a great general Even in the Marine Corps (where Puller is as Jon Hoffman has said, ‘is the mythological hero of the Marine Corps – the very icon of the entire establishment’) he is most well known for his actions and exploits in the Pacific Campaign and Korea – conventional wars. Yet Puller cut his teeth as a junior officer in the small wars of the USMC in the 1920s and 1930s, and from what I have read, he was very effective in these small wars (and yes, most Marines do know this, more or less, but the emphasis is on WWII and Korea).
Finding other officers such as Puller who were very good or excellent in small wars, who, while not great ‘generals’, were as more junior officers still great leaders in and practitioners of small wars. These men (and women) can serve as role models to exemplify what is required of the officers of today and tomorrow, while that same time indicating that small wars/COIN/irregular warfare is an important part of what the US military does, rather than being, as they sometimes appear to be, terms that are best not used in polite company.
TT
Originally Posted by wm
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Concur!
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