Adapt Or Die

[MattC86]

This is one of the examples I like to use of the Army NOT repeating Vietnam-era institutional mistakes. During that war there was precious little information flowing from the combat zone back to training areas (except for some "search the village" courses and smaller things) until late in the war. This time around they're avoiding that mistake and making tons of good information available. Now if they'd just avoid the same sort of personnel mistakes we'd be that much more to the good.

Once the war is over, no matter the outcome, would you say it's safe to assume the Army won't ignore the COIN lessons learned so painfully like it did after Vietnam?

That FM 3-24 is the first doctrine for COIN since Vietnam is a real travesty. I hope and assume that since we won't be able to refocus on "the real war" like in the 1970s when we had Soviet tank divisions to contend with, we will properly institutionalize the COIN lessons of Iraq into a doctrine that serves not just as a stopgap for a current conflict, but one that takes a proper place within our theory and our training.

Finally, what are the personnel issues you're talking about? Individual personnel (i.e., leaders) or general personnel (deployment and rotation) policies?

Matt

[SWJED]

Matt,

Welcome to the Council - good first post and some topical questions posed. We encourage new members to also post an intro on the Tell Us About You #2... thread. Thanks, and again welcome to the SWC.

Dave

[Tom Odom]

Once the war is over, no matter the outcome, would you say it's safe to assume the Army won't ignore the COIN lessons learned so painfully like it did after Vietnam?

The lesson from the past is that is not a safe assumption; I hope I am wrong. But the past says we go back to what we like.

Tom

[Rob Thornton]

Once the war is over, no matter the outcome, would you say it's safe to assume the Army won't ignore the COIN lessons learned so painfully like it did after Vietnam?

Good Op/Ed piece I thought from the Washington Post entitled The Next Intervention

Is the United States out of the intervention business for a while? With two difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a divided public, the conventional answer is that it will be a long time before any American president, Democrat or Republican, again dispatches troops into conflict overseas.

As usual, though, the conventional wisdom is almost certainly wrong. ......

What I like about the article is it points to the difference between what we say before entering office and what we do when the realities of gevernance encumber us. Our perspective changes. Never underestimate the power of a short memory, or the ability to revise. Having said that there is no gaurentee that we will acknowledge things as they are vs. how we'd prefer them. LTC (R) Daryll Schoening was fond of saying, "Those are not lessons learned, they are lessons available"

[Steve Blair]

Once the war is over, no matter the outcome, would you say it's safe to assume the Army won't ignore the COIN lessons learned so painfully like it did after Vietnam?

That FM 3-24 is the first doctrine for COIN since Vietnam is a real travesty. I hope and assume that since we won't be able to refocus on "the real war" like in the 1970s when we had Soviet tank divisions to contend with, we will properly institutionalize the COIN lessons of Iraq into a doctrine that serves not just as a stopgap for a current conflict, but one that takes a proper place within our theory and our training.

Finally, what are the personnel issues you're talking about? Individual personnel (i.e., leaders) or general personnel (deployment and rotation) policies?

Matt

Welcome, Matt!

With personnel I'm referring to the exodus of skilled combat leaders that took place after Vietnam, as well as the ticket-punching mentality among some in the officer corps during that conflict.

I would hope that the Army as an institution does not lose track of the COIN lessons that they're learning now, but like Tom I fear that they will "lose" them again. This has been a pattern going back to the Indian Wars.

[MattC86]

In regards to Steve and Tom, I wonder if the different geopolitical realities of now vs., say, 1975 may make a difference. My hope, I guess, is that since the Army (and the Marine Corps, but the Army in particular) can't just refocus on "the right war" that suits their doctrinal preference, they will continue to focus on small wars and COIN. I think that with the specter of future insurgencies, regime changes, and nation-building on the horizon, we can't just say "we don't do this kind of stuff," which was essentially what the Powell Doctrine was all about.

Matt

[Tom Odom]

In regards to Steve and Tom, I wonder if the different geopolitical realities of now vs., say, 1975 may make a difference. My hope, I guess, is that since the Army (and the Marine Corps, but the Army in particular) can't just refocus on "the right war" that suits their doctrinal preference, they will continue to focus on small wars and COIN. I think that with the specter of future insurgencies, regime changes, and nation-building on the horizon, we can't just say "we don't do this kind of stuff," which was essentially what the Powell Doctrine was all about.

Matt

Matt,

As someone still in service--admittedly as a broken down retiree now civilian--I already hear remarks that highten my concerns.

Bottom line it will be up to Rob and Ryan and everyone of the younger generation to see it does not happen again.

Best

Tom

[Steve Blair]

Matt,

As someone still in service--admittedly as a broken down retiree now civilian--I already hear remarks that highten my concerns.

Bottom line it will be up to Rob and Ryan and everyone of the younger generation to see it does not happen again.

Best

Tom

Agreed, and this is a trend that predates the Cold War by at least 100 years.

It all has to do with who makes it through the personnel things I mentioned earlier and manages to either push through major change or preserve the lessons that others might want to forget (or consign to the Marxist-Leninist "dustbin of history"). Sadly that's what's usually required.

[Tom Odom]

On the subject of learning past lessons, I found this today.

GEN Warner was as LTG Warner XVIII Airborne Corps commander and one of his sons, now retired BG "Jim" Warner was with me in 2-505. We were Ranger buddies in Ranger Class 2-77. Jim's final assignment was as Dep Commandant at CGSC where I had a chance to see him a few months before he retired.

Anyway, his Dad discusses the Army and learning from Vietnam (as in not learning). He also discusses losing his grandaughter in Afghanistan, Jim's niece and the first female casualty from West Point.

A veteran general hears echoes from Vietnam in Iraq

WASHINGTON — Volney Warner thinks big. A retired Army four-star general who helped craft counterinsurgency doctrine during the Vietnam War, he's made a career out of thinking about how U.S. military strategy should advance America's global interests.

How does domestic politics shape military tactics? How and why did U.S. civilian and military leaders fail in Vietnam and Iraq? What has Iraq taught the U.S. military about unconventional war?

Warner is more than a detached student of America's current conflicts: Seven of his immediate family members have served in the military, five of them in Iraq or Afghanistan. They include his two sons, one a retired brigadier general and the other a retired colonel; a son-in-law who trained local troops in Iraq as a brigadier general; a granddaughter who's a captain in the Army Reserve; a grandson serving in Iraq and another grandson at West Point who'll be commissioned as an officer in June and probably ordered to a war zone immediately.

Also, Warner's 24-year-old granddaughter, Army 1st Lt. Laura Walker, who served in Iraq in 2004 and was killed by a homemade bomb a year later on her second combat tour, this time in Afghanistan. Her death makes Warner ponder, sometimes publicly, who was responsible for sending his granddaughter to two war zones without a sound strategy for victory.

[Cavguy]

In regards to Steve and Tom, I wonder if the different geopolitical realities of now vs., say, 1975 may make a difference. My hope, I guess, is that since the Army (and the Marine Corps, but the Army in particular) can't just refocus on "the right war" that suits their doctrinal preference, they will continue to focus on small wars and COIN. I think that with the specter of future insurgencies, regime changes, and nation-building on the horizon, we can't just say "we don't do this kind of stuff," which was essentially what the Powell Doctrine was all about.

Matt

Good point. We don't have a Soviet Union to run back to, and China is hardly a conventional peer competitor in the next 20 years. COIN and IW will make up a large part of what we must contend with. Unless we go back to 1920's/30's isolationism .....

However, I would say that part of our troubles in Iraq stemmed from not following the Powell doctrine - that a) We didn't have a strategic plan b) we didn't send overwhelming force. Those two decisions are the primary reasons Iraq went into chaos - we never filled the order/security vacuum early, and nature abhors a vacuum. Add in all the root causes of insurgencies were present and Voila! Iraq 2003-2007. Even if we had had good COIN operational concepts, tactics, and education in 2003, it wouldn't have compensated for a lack of a workable strategy.

[Rob Thornton]

We recently went throuh a COA development excercise (UNCLASS) for a COCOM (not as part of COCOM JPG, but as a class assignment) based on some future events. The COA we adopted based on how it came out in the comparrison was heavy on UW.

Frankly it was a bridge to far as we fleshed it out and realized the ammount of time and the types of resources required were possibly beyond our ability to generate or sustain, and that the guarentee of mission success was too low by comparrison.

However, that has never stopped a COA from being adopted, particualrly if at the moment it appears to be the most most politically palatable given recent memories or what have you, and you can wish away some of the hard stuff because its hard to qualify or quantify in a .ppt deep COA.

It did get me thinking though since there is much discussion about how the Operational Environment is changing, and what it requires to succeed in it. Are we (in general) starting to acknowledge the need for greater capacity in UW to address irregular and assymetric threats in an evolving OE? Do we need them to provide policy more flexible strategic alternatives? If we do, then how much of it do we need, to supplant large scale capabilities, traditional capabilities? How does our strategic culture "the American Way of War" play into our ability to adapt/change? How much of this should be limited to improving SOF capacity, and how much should become the purview of GP forces? How can we get "economies" in certain areas - ex. If a GP soldier has extensive knowledge of COIN and FID, can he pull some degree of double duty in UW tasks such as training an insurgency?

What does this say about how we spend our $$$?

[Ken White]

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It did get me thinking though since there is much discussion about how the Operational Environment is changing, and what it requires to succeed in it. Are we (in general) starting to acknowledge the need for greater capacity in UW to address irregular and assymetric threats in an evolving OE? Do we need them to provide policy more flexible strategic alternatives? If we do, then how much of it do we need, to supplant large scale capabilities, traditional capabilities? How does our strategic culture "the American Way of War" play into our ability to adapt/change? How much of this should be limited to improving SOF capacity, and how much should become the purview of GP forces? How can we get "economies" in certain areas - ex. If a GP soldier has extensive knowledge of COIN and FID, can he pull some degree of double duty in UW tasks such as training an insurgency?

What does this say about how we spend our $$$?

Hi, Rob

you mean simply training and developing some sideline expertise, then given the post Cold War world, I'd say it's long overdue.

The Weinberger Doctrine, co-opted by Powell was an overt effort to tailor Congressional and White House thinking to avoid this fact of life:

"However, that has never stopped a COA from being adopted, particualrly if at the moment it appears to be the most most politically palatable given recent memories or what have you, and you can wish away some of the hard stuff because its hard to qualify or quantify in a .ppt deep COA."

It worked as long as there were nice (or cautious) guys in the White House. Five such in a row from Ford to Clinton was an unusually long run for such types. However, it was never a very realistic idea and it was always destined to be -- and is -- as they say OBE...

The probability is that there will be a lot of brush fires and we'll need to be able to tend to them along with being prepared fro medium notice mid-level and resonably decent notice major war. We have got to be full spectrum. The kids can cope with it. I wish I was more certain that some of the senior folks can do so...

I think we need to help them shape policy with respect to capabilities, stop saying "Yessir, Yessir..." We 'can-do' ourselves to death.

Our culture is not going to change, ergo we will have to -- that message came out of the late sixties and was duly ignored. Then along came DS/DS -- and as one guy I worked with at the time said "We are in trouble now; 100 casualties in 100 hours will be the new paradigm and we'll likely never see it again..."

I also think SOF is about as big as the sustainment pool will support -- and I think it's big enough. They need badly to do a role and mission sort out. The GP forces are capable of doing much more than we have them do and that major error needs to be fixed.

Heh. I think it says the same thing about spending our $$$ as we all know to be true -- we waste a lot...

[Rob Thornton]

Ken,

I also think SOF is about as big as the sustainment pool will support -- and I think it's big enough. They need badly to do a role and mission sort out. The GP forces are capable of doing much more than we have them do and that major error needs to be fixed.

I guess that is what I'm thinking. I've seen the GPs do some incredible stuff. Things I might've considered the purview of SOF 5 or 10 years ago, I now see GP forces conducting. Part of its manning, equipping and training, but some of it happened because it just had to given the OE.

So I'm thinking how does the experience we've gained over the last few years translate into the needs of tomorrow? Do we need for example new Joint doctrine that examines the relationship and integration of GP forces and SOF?

you mean simply training and developing some sideline expertise, then given the post Cold War world, I'd say it's long overdue.

I think that is probably the place to start - ask the question, "what would it take to succeed at a long term (5-10 years) major campaign where the CFSOCC was the supported CMD for the largest chunks in a place where the benefits do not fit the OEF model because the conditions are very different?"

I guess we are also wrestling with this on a larger scale as JSOC has the lead in the GWOT - is the military in general organized, trained and equipped to be a supporting effort? Of course, if the answer is no, or maybe even not optimally, then maybe we should be asking why, what would it take, what is the Delta, and how long would it take?
Regards, Rob