Mason,

The answer to your question on rotations was answered quite well above: yes rollover tours at 1 one year (or 15 months) or 6-7 months for the Marines hurt operations because it takes some time to develop situational understanding in an environment like Iraq or Afghanistan. The trade off is taking care of families and soldiers because our cultural expectations have changed dramatically since WWII when Johnny went to war until the war was over. That was of course a different conflict on a greater scale that allowed for mass mobilization.

But even with a tour length of 2 or 3 years, we --the larger military body including the Air Force and the Navy--have a cultural aversion to "lesser conflicts." We woud rather train to the greater but much less likely threat of high intensity conflict for obvious and less obvious reasons. The most obvious is the greater threat; the argument is that you train to the greater threat and any HIC soldier can adjust to a lesser threat. Nagl is great in pointing out the systemic role of doctrine in the US Army (versus the Brits) in conditioning leaders to think only in HIC terms. The reality in my opinion is that HIC soldiers can be adjusted--the real issue is HIC colonels and generals. Getting them to adjust is much like asking a Baptist preacher to become a Catholic.

Lesser obvious reasons for the HIC fixation fall into what Eisenhower warned about in the military industrial complex; HIC means big dollar systems. COIN is personnel centric. The lastest wrinkle in the military industrial complex is the use of PMCs which turns personnel costs into business with huge returns for those fielding the contracts. On a matter near and dear to me as a FAO--language--we still have the science and industrial community trying to "fix" langauage deficiencies with phrasalators and such when we should be investing the effort in training linguists.

The only way I see solving the institutional resistance to COIN and lesser but more likely conflict in the US military is finding another George Marshall to erssentially relieve any and all GOs who cannot get with the program, just as Marshall did on the eve of WWII.

Best
Tom