Abrams made the logical decision to put the main effort into ability to deter a peer competitor as he should have done. He did not take COIN or FID off the table; that was done later by Donn Starry at TRADOC and affirmed by Bernie Rogers as CofSA. The Army kept some semblance of effort at LIC until John Wickham left the job. Then it got almost totally wiped out by a series of Artillerymen and Tankers with a lot of European experience.
To put the principal effort into Europe post Viet Nam made all the sense in the world. To downplay COIN and FID made sense. That was true in 1972 and it remained true until the late 80s. However, to later eliminate anything to do with LIC, particularly after 1991 was simply wrong. Still, even that and the foolish Weinberger and Powell doctrines -- abrogation of which by both Clinton and Bush 43 prove that DoD cannot influence US Foreign policy to the extent they'd like to believe -- were not the real problem.
The problem that created the lack of planning for the post attack phase was poor training; specifically BCTP. In that training regimen, the war was played by the Generals and Colonels, active on one side and retired on the other and it was good solid and very effective training. However, it had a flaw. After the last big US attack, the victory was won -- then they turned off the computers and the lights and left the room...
The problem in Iraq was no one had trained on what to do so they effectively did nothing for a year and a half. That's been fixed. The even better news is that BCTP has also been fixed in current iterations.
What is worrying is that Eurocentricity still seems to be with us...
That's not the last war, it was three wars ago...![]()
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