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.

[John Grenier]

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.

Doctrine is indeed a political football. Most of it is not worth the paper it is printed on.

Are you a member of SMH? I think you'll find that operational historians are a dying breed because they don't get at the important issues of history. A few places like CMH and CSI write operational histories, but they are really bad. Again, more just reports and lessons learned, but without the proper historic and historiographic context, they become useless. There are a lot of really outstanding military historians out there writing some really good stuff, but on the whole, folks in the military don't listen to them because of the anti-intellectual bias of the military. The good stuff is out there, but it takes a long time to master it.

[Ken White]

... but on the whole, folks in the military don't listen to them because of the anti-intellectual bias of the military. The good stuff is out there, but it takes a long time to master it.

I think rather than bias, your last clause better explains the failure to listen...