dissertation help please! US military culture and small wars.

[Schmedlap]

Regarding the Army's culture in terms of fighting small wars - I may be overly paraphrasing this, but a few thoughts...

- I think the gist of Nagl's Eating Soup book was that out ability to prevail in COIN is dependent upon what kind of learning organization we are. How fast do we learn and are we sufficiently open to learning new things and, if so, how quickly can we implement those lessons?

- Consider (generally) how we learned in Vietnam. A guy deployed for a year, learned a bunch of stuff, came home, went to a professional school, shared those lessons (somewhat) with his peers, his peers returned to their units and hopefully passed along those lessons. The process took months. (If I'm off base with that, I'm sure one of the board's resident dinosaurs can correct me). Now, it occurs in almost real time. Soldiers go on patrol, return to base, hop online, and share lessons learned with anyone else in the Army (anywhere in the world) who cares to listen. The amount of web traffic on our knowledge sharing networks suggests that many do care to listen.

- Our online knowledge-sharing networks (PlatoonLeader.army.mil, CompanyCommand.army.mil, NCONet, S3-XONEt, etc, etc) help to facilitate this sharing of lessons learned directly among Soldiers. Our Center of Army Lessons Learned helps as well. The fact that the Army uses these networks effectively suggests that the Army culture is conducive to the change and learning necessary to win small wars that we were unprepared for when we first got engaged in them.

[John T. Fishel]

off base if you think the system actually internalized the lessons from Vietnam. It recorded them and wrote them down and preserved them in doctrine. But it did not actually learn them. Oh, some folk did - SF, and what in the 80s would be called LICimites - but not the Army as a whole. The Marines, IMO, partially learned these lessons as a system but not the Army.

Cheers from one old dinosaur

JohnT

[Schmedlap]

off base if you think the system actually internalized the lessons from Vietnam. It recorded them and wrote them down and preserved them in doctrine. But it did not actually learn them...

Cheers from one old dinosaur

Johnosaurus Rex,

Understood. I was referring more to the process. The process being that lessons were learned by individuals who brought those lessons back after a one-year deployment and shared those lessons with whichever peers cared to listen, and then, in some cases, those peers spread those lessons by word of mouth (a very long delay between an individual learning and that lesson being shared). Did I get that part about right? It seems like what formerly took months now takes days. As for internalizing those lessons - agree - and I still wonder if we will internalize the lessons that we learn today or if we will try to forget it and revert back to preparing to fight an industrialized total war against some imaginary opponent who will be stupid enough to fight us on our terms.

I guess not only speed by openness is relevant, too. My impression is that much of the military started to be exposed to the right lessons by the end of Vietnam, but a lot of leadership still didn't want to hear it. So even if the lesson-spreading was quicker, it would have simply slammed into the brick wall at a higher velocity, rather than scaling it.

[Ken White]

Dinosaurs have been attracted to fresh meat...

Ditto what John T. said. Schmedlap missed only one small thing with respect to Viet Nam -- repeat tours. The Officers and NCOs who learned good lessons the bad way were only able to impart them to a few others before they left for another tour in the land of opportunity. The casualty and KIA rates for NCOs and Co Grade officers meant that the lesson diffusion was not great. Still, basic point that lesson impartation during that war was poor is generally correct.

Lessons learned today indeed are proliferated rapidly and the Army has adapted far more rapidly and effectively than it did in Viet Nam. Organizations like the Asymmetric Warfare Group have been instrumental in pushing new techniques (and, equally or more importantly, reviving old ones) so that's correct.

Two points for consideration though.

While lessons learned do get rapidly disseminated and the system adapts more rapidly, everyone has to realize that the personnel system has NOT adapted and that personnel turbulence has a significant adverse impact on units, lessons learned and embedding those lessons in the units.

We were unprepared for this bout of Small Wars due to a POLICY, not doctrine, that decreed they should be ignored. Numerous people in the Army during the 1975-2002 period tried to reverse that policy to no avail. So there is a culture issue because the culture drove that policy and most within the culture subscribed to it. Culture is largely molded in organizations by personnel selection and promotion policies as well as by organizational education and training processes. If you do not fix those things, you will not change the culture. Point is that all the effective networks in being do not translate to effective training (ask the Troops...) and that they have not thus far affected the culture.

One can only hope they will...

Boom, boom, boom, ...., ...

P.S.

Sigaba is on to something with Upton. The US Army adopted all the bad aspects of the German General Staff and training systems and none of their good ones. We should have developed as US specific system and we did not; we pulled our usual trick with many things -- copied someone else's idea, engineered it until it didn't work as well, tacked on a few minor embellishments and called it our brilliant solution to the problem.

We are slow to learn...

[IntelTrooper]

We are slow to learn...

So the working title of the dissertation is: 'How Does the Culture of the American Military Prevent Them From Waging Small Wars Effectively?'

Perhaps questions in the title of dissertations is more of the style in that part of the world, but if one were to write such a thing in the US it would probably be more along the lines of:
Lessons Not Learned: American Military Culture and Small Wars, 1950-2006

[Steve Blair]

So the working title of the dissertation is: 'How Does the Culture of the American Military Prevent Them From Waging Small Wars Effectively?'

Perhaps questions in the title of dissertations is more of the style in that part of the world, but if one were to write such a thing in the US it would probably be more along the lines of:
Lessons Not Learned: American Military Culture and Small Wars, 1950-2006

Change the time period from 1950 to, say, 1792 or so and you might be onto something....

Vietnam is just a more recent example of our system failing to retain these lessons, or to emphasis the knowledge it did retain.

[Ken White]

Change the time period from 1950 to, say, 1792 or so and you might be onto something....

Vietnam is just a more recent example of our system failing to retain these lessons, or to emphasis the knowledge it did retain.

and you can add in large wars as well.

The problem is skill decay from non use between wars, varying opponents who suffer from the same problems and adopt different fixes for them thereby confronting us with different TTP / Operational methods and the (probably necessary) Momization, my term for excessive niceness, in civil society between wars.

ADDED:{The generational problem of rejecting all your parent's ideas is also involved -- each new generation of senior leaders seems to believe they should reject all that came before because they are better and smarter. That's not usually so but it is very American -- witness each new Administration totally rejecting all the previous Admin did and said -- and then adopting precisely the same methods and goals... END Addendum}

Add our process of one year or so tours since Korea and one is confronted with a massive 'unlearning' of muscle memory, dimming of senses and memories, fragmentation of corporate values and processes and culture and emotional switches between Momization and the particular fight of the day. Thus skill and competency shortfalls are embedded by practices designed for peace. Take that peacetime conditioned force and throw it into a fight and you have obvious problems.

Penalty of living in a democracy. It's worth it in my estimation but it is tough on those who have to fight. Luckily, enough people look at it as I did and do -- as a tolerable burden. So far...

Those problems could be fixed, obviously, by increasing Guard and Reserve strength and equipping and training them for MCO; having smaller active forces, more selective in recruiting, better trained and equipped to do the fire brigade stuff and by increasing significantly our intel and diplomatic abilities -- and, more importantly, our political will -- to preclude commitment to unnecessary and almost always counterproductive (and unduly costly in all senses) FID and SFA operations.

However, the political will to employ such a force does not exist nor is there political will to create such a force because there is no political courage to tolerate such a force. So we get to bumble along as usual.

It's the American way. Generally works out as most of our opponents are way more inept than we are. So far...

[marct]

Hi folks,

So the working title of the dissertation is: 'How Does the Culture of the American Military Prevent Them From Waging Small Wars Effectively?'

Perhaps questions in the title of dissertations is more of the style in that part of the world, but if one were to write such a thing in the US it would probably be more along the lines of:
Lessons Not Learned: American Military Culture and Small Wars, 1950-2006

Change the time period from 1950 to, say, 1792 or so and you might be onto something....

You know, I would change the title to "Does the Culture of the American Military Prevent Them From Waging Small Wars Effectively? American Military Culture and Small Wars, 1776 - 2006".

The real key, IMHO, is the word "effectively" (we can argue about the term "culture" latter on ). Over the centuries, the concept of what is "effective" has shifted, covering the spectrum from forced deportation (e.g "The Trail of Tears"), genocide including biological weapons (e.g. smallpox), to "Hearts and Minds". The problem is semantic: "effective" assumes a particular effect is desired - which is a policy / culture choice.

To my mind, phrasing the question in the dissertations as "How does...." implies that it is US military culture that is the primary source of ineffectiveness. Personally, while I would certainly agree that it is a factor, I do not view it as the primary (or even dominant) cause. Let me further note that US military culture is strongly embedded in the more general US culture, and that its options and actions are strongly controlled (in the sense of environmental influences and selection criteria) by the political culture of the US.