Adapt Or Die

[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.