Quote Originally Posted by John T. Fishel View Post
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.