America's Cultural First Battles:
Little Big Horn, Pearl Harbor, Mogadishu, and Nasiriyah
LTC Thomas P. Odom, US Army (ret.)
Somalia serves as stark reminder of the risks in not understanding the cultural battlefield.
As a military, our record in understanding the effects of culture on military operations is very much a history of learning by making mistakes. Ultimately we tend to get it right but only after getting it wrong. Custer vision of battle at the Little Big Horn was certainly culturally flawed. And as a people we certainly had it wrong with the Japanese; those "near-sighted" pilots could indeed deliver bombs and torpedoes accurately. Although neither Custer nor his command survived to see it happen, we eventually conquered the Sioux and Cheyenne. We did the same against the Japanese less than four years after Pearl Harbor. Sometimes as in the case of Mogadishu in 1993 getting it wrong meant we lost. Period. The war goes on Iraq four years after Fedayeen resistance in Nasiriyah surprised us. In many ways that pattern of cultural misreads matches our experience in battle.
Losing to Win
In the 1980s, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Heller and Brigadier General William A. Stofft put together an anthology of essays entitled America's First Battles, 1776-1965. Both Heller and Stofft had been members of the Combat Studies Institute, at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Stofft became the Chief of Military History for the U.S. Army, going on later to become Commandant of the U.S. Army War College. First Battles described the American military pattern of losing early battles only to ultimately win the war in question. The sole exception to that pattern was Vietnam where early victories were misinterpreted and ultimately the U.S. lost the war. Heller and Stofft's anthology described these struggles in terms of training, equipment, doctrine, and political factors. Cultural effects also played a role in these wars. Certainly the misinterpretation of early victories in Vietnam can be tied to cultural understanding.
No More Task Force Smiths
Even as Heller and Stofft's work appeared on bookshelves, the U.S. military and the U.S. Army in particular were taking steps to break the seeming tradition of losing early to win later. The U.S. military had become a professional standing force, one that concentrated on training for war against the Warsaw Pact. The U.S. Army established the Combat Training Centers to ensure that we won first and won decisively. U.S. Army doctrine similarly shifted from the Active Defense to the offensively minded Airland Battle. All of these changes were validated in 1991 in Desert Storm. We had the doctrine, the organization, the training, and the Soldiers necessary to win our first battle and we did decisively.
Desert Shield and Desert Storm
Did we also get the cultural question right in Desert Storm? In retrospect, yes and no seems to be the answer. Our read of the strategic situation and its cultural implications was largely correct. We built an effective Coalition that isolated Iraq militarily and culturally. We understood the ramifications of the long-standing Arab-Israeli conflict for the stability of our Coalition. But we did not anticipate just how quickly cultural factors could come into play until Saddam began his SCUD war against Israel and us. We did not adequately prepare for the aftermath in Shia southern Iraq or Kurdish northern Iraq of our sudden victory in Kuwait. Tactically we generally treated cultural effects as something to be contained; our separation of Arab armies from Western armies in the Coalition's battle array makes that clear....
Good Anthropology, Bad History: The Cultural Turn in Studying War
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