John,

Great points, and since you have obviously put a lot of thought into this I wonder if you have any ideas on how to operationalize history, or perhaps more accurately, how do we reengineer our education system so the lessons of history are brought to the forefront for consideration in current operation or during the planning of future operations? We have volumes of knowledge in our history databases that always seem to magically pop up after we errored by ignoring the lessons.

As one of my former bosses said we don't have lessons learned, we just have lessons. So the question is how do we get to lessons learned in time to prevent rewalking the same mistakes other have made and have documented so many times.

It wouldn't hurt to have a series of Cliff Notes on different categories of military operations history, sort of like our joint pubs, but more at the tactical/operational level. Then make our professional education more relevant to today's operational environment, by making the study of irregular warfare mandatory rather than optional. These are small steps that may make us a little better, but I think the real answer is drastically reengineering our education/training systems, without breaking what isn't broke, because we still need an untouchable conventional warfighting capability.