Below is the starter for this thread that came out of a response I put forward in the Counter-Insurgency for U.S. Policy Makers thread that Steve Metz started:

How will OIF be remembered - from which parts will we draw lessons available? What was John Ford trying to tell us when Jimmy Stewart admits to not having killed Lee Marvin in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance?

I have some concern that when OIF is reviewed we will pick and choose what we want to learn out of it. If we were doing a review right now what would we lay out as the top 5 or so takeaways and how would that effect change? I'm a bit concerned that as a military we might go for the low hanging fruit instead of really being introspective and looking forward with regards not only to our own war, but the other wars going on around us, and how potential adversaries might be eyeballing us and their neighbors.

Do we simplify things through aggregation of events to get our arms around it -a kind of historical compression - where important bits get crushed in order to make the larger event fit the place we assign it? Do we linearize historical events to a point where they are seen only in relation to previous and subsequent events and as such lose important context, or are discarded as irrelevant? We have to be real careful not to do this.

At certain points in OIF you'll find some serious fights where the nature of war became reasonably unbridled and pure for the combatants, even if outside of that it was more tethered to its political context. This not only happened during the invasion, but in Ramadi, Fallujah, Baghdad, Mosul and several other places between the invasion and up to 2007. We still consider there is a possibility of large scale fights that might happen as a result of JAM, folks lying low until we start to withdraw BCTs or if events exterior to OIF should occur - we have to in order to lessen the chance of being surprised. We should not write those fights off as anomalies - nor should we cite them as the norm. Maybe its just the way chance and probability are going to play out to scale given the stakes of interested parties. What appears of tactical consequence to us, might be perceived as strategic to somebody else - and their reaction might be as well.

Consider what it takes to deploy and sustain a large military force of air, sea and ground components capable of doing what we did in the initial phase of OIF - too many times I think policy folks (and even ourselves) don't understand or forget the mechanisms involved in that task until we actually have to do it. As such we often lack an appreciation for the overhead required to adjust to the friction of doing these big muscle movements with all the supporting ones that make it possible.
RA ad Ken asked me to consider putting up a thread that would offer an an opportunity to consider what we've learned from OIF thus far. I had to think about that for a moment because it meant pulling a response from one thread and potentially losing the context from which the response was given.

I think that is OK though - and I think we must always ask questions about what we've learned - but I wanted to qualify what responses "might" consist of:

- It could be about the pre-war to contemplating the post war.
- It could be from the tactical to the strategic.
- It could be from the domestic to the international.
- It could be about the enemy or about ourselves.
- It could be about Iraq or about Iraq's neighbors.
- It could be about our strategic culture or our morals and values with regard to how war changes us
- It could be about politics or how we wage war
- It cold be about IO or expectations
- It could be about .....

In sum - the floor is wide open. You don't need to stay on a single topic - cover five different ones if you want - be brief or be explanatory. I think it would be helpful if you can rank order them and tell why - so we all understand why something is important.

For those wondering about the Liberty Valance ref. - John Wayne actually shot Lee Marvin, but after an older Jimmy Stewart tells all at the end, the guy recording the story tears it up - truth would not play out as well as the legend of a shop keeper standing down the town bad guy - we have to try hard and prevent that if we stand a chance of learning the right lessons and preparing for future wars. From the first guys and gals who crossed the berm and went into Iraq (and the pilots who flew those first missions) our folks have overcome fog and friction found within the METT-TC conditions - there are all kinds of lesson we should be considering.

Best Regards, Rob

I'll eventually get around to putting up my 5 - but I want to think about them awhile.