Hi Old Eagle--

Your conspiracy theory made me Google my old boss at Leavenworth, Don Holder. I breathed a sigh of relief when I found that it was the 2nd ACR he commanded in DS/DS.

I think your comments about the post-Vietnam army are spot on. I worked with a guy at the AWC at Carlisle who would not have been averse to giving the whole light mission to the USMC - he was an engineer and a bright guy.

The only problem with your theory - as a general explanation - is that the phenomenon predates Vietnam by about 350 years. It all started in Jamestown VA in 1607 when CPT John Smith's militia began fighting Powhatan's warriors in the first of America's many small wars. By the French and Indian War militia officers like G. Washington were seeking glory in the big battles. The point is that from the beginning, the American officer corps wanted to fight conventional wars even though it spent most of its time fighting small wars. But every generation got its big war - Revolution, 1812, Mexico, Civil War, Spanish-Am, WWI, WWII, Korea ... and forgot about its small wars experience. The Marines, at least wrote it down as doctrine but they wrote the Small Wars Manual at the same time they were gearing up for amphibious ops in WWII, so its effect was marginal. The other positive thing is that we did appear to learn something and effectively applied our COIN doctrine in El Salvador and then wrote its lessons into the doctrine in FM 100-20 of 1990. Those lessons were effectively transferred into Joint Pub 3-07. So, I was encouraged that, perhaps, we had internalized the lessons of the past. Then came OIF,"transformation," and the revision of SASO doctrine necessitating and interim COIN manual that evolved into FM 3-24. In other words, we reinvented the wheel once again!

My theory was somewhat like yours but with a longer historical perspective. My problem is that I don't think that our explanations get at as much of the reason for this process of ignoring our past and, moreover, rejecting it as I previously thought. Hence, my - what Marct calls - dissertation question.

Cheers (I think)

John