Quote Originally Posted by Cavguy View Post
I don't think anyone disagrees with this - but - how do we educationally prepare soldiers for full-spectrum ops?

I, like many others, did not feel that the army provided sufficent grounding in COIN basics prior to 2003 as part of our professional military education, and as a result we committed major avoidable errors in tactical COIN 2003-2004.

I think the answer lies more in professional education versus training, as I look back at my OBC and CCC I realize nearly all of it was training. In line units, only three commanders (two BN and one CO) of mine had any regular sort of formal OPD program.

It may be easy to criticize Galula, but I would submit if more officers had read that book as part of a general military education (alongside all other works), we may have created less problems than we ultimately did in OIF.

Niel
Niel: right, and now with the operational demands of coin we must train our formations to perform the mission they are getting ready to conduct which means until we ramp-down we must maintain our operational training focus on coin. But as I said that comes at a cost, there is risk involved. Now the Coin advocates response is well, really, so what, because we must win the wars we are in now so don’t worry about the future. I don’t buy that logic, and I think it to be irresponsible. This gets to your question about education. Certainly at places like the Army War College and other defense educational institutions there is an important place for coin, irregular war as subjects for education. But we should not turn these places into Coin Academies where that is all that they do there. Why? Because we must be able to think beyond the current wars in terms of policy and strategy, do otherwise would be to ignore a duty that we have to our elected leaders and the people of the United States.

finally, you and I will never agree on your other points. I think it is just flat-wrong to think counterfactually that if more soldiers had read Galula things would have turned out differently. You cannot prove that anyway. But what I can prove at least through the record as it is given to us from the most recent credible histories written is that the majority of American Army tactical units transitioned quickly to full-spectrum operations and within that were conducting many best practices in coin. Were these capabilities as wide-spread as they were under the Surge? Probably not, but they still were wide-spread and the delta so to speak was not decisive.

Such arguments of "if we had done this or that" are really a big large trope within the american army for trying to fight vietnam all over again in iraq but this time win.

gg