Regarding the Army's culture in terms of fighting small wars - I may be overly paraphrasing this, but a few thoughts...
- I think the gist of Nagl's Eating Soup book was that out ability to prevail in COIN is dependent upon what kind of learning organization we are. How fast do we learn and are we sufficiently open to learning new things and, if so, how quickly can we implement those lessons?
- Consider (generally) how we learned in Vietnam. A guy deployed for a year, learned a bunch of stuff, came home, went to a professional school, shared those lessons (somewhat) with his peers, his peers returned to their units and hopefully passed along those lessons. The process took months. (If I'm off base with that, I'm sure one of the board's resident dinosaurs can correct me). Now, it occurs in almost real time. Soldiers go on patrol, return to base, hop online, and share lessons learned with anyone else in the Army (anywhere in the world) who cares to listen. The amount of web traffic on our knowledge sharing networks suggests that many do care to listen.
- Our online knowledge-sharing networks (PlatoonLeader.army.mil, CompanyCommand.army.mil, NCONet, S3-XONEt, etc, etc) help to facilitate this sharing of lessons learned directly among Soldiers. Our Center of Army Lessons Learned helps as well. The fact that the Army uses these networks effectively suggests that the Army culture is conducive to the change and learning necessary to win small wars that we were unprepared for when we first got engaged in them.
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