Applying the lessons of late 19th/early 20th century asymmetrical warfare

[William F. Owen]

I just had a student in the Norwich MA in Mil Hist program write his end-of-program (we don't call it a thesis because it is not) on why the US military continues to conflate the terms UW, FID, revolutionary, guerrilla, COIN, LIC, IW, spec ops, etc. His argument fell partly on the point that the people responsible for writing the doctrine for those operations do not have the proper training in history. Instead, they cherry pick and think reading some stuff on the web will do the trick. Alas, it ain't so.

IMO, Doctrine writers tend not to write Doctrine. They write sales documents for concepts.
Doctrine writers and also Military Theorists, tend to be very bad at military history. Indeed we keep confusing "military historians" with "military theorists." Selective use of sources and simplistic narratives as to events are a huge problem.
My beef with most military history is it's failure to provide insight, and instead to provide narrative. When have almost no "Operational historians" bar the likes of Paddy Griffiths.