Dinosaurs have been attracted to fresh meat...

Ditto what John T. said. Schmedlap missed only one small thing with respect to Viet Nam -- repeat tours. The Officers and NCOs who learned good lessons the bad way were only able to impart them to a few others before they left for another tour in the land of opportunity. The casualty and KIA rates for NCOs and Co Grade officers meant that the lesson diffusion was not great. Still, basic point that lesson impartation during that war was poor is generally correct.

Lessons learned today indeed are proliferated rapidly and the Army has adapted far more rapidly and effectively than it did in Viet Nam. Organizations like the Asymmetric Warfare Group have been instrumental in pushing new techniques (and, equally or more importantly, reviving old ones) so that's correct.

Two points for consideration though.

While lessons learned do get rapidly disseminated and the system adapts more rapidly, everyone has to realize that the personnel system has NOT adapted and that personnel turbulence has a significant adverse impact on units, lessons learned and embedding those lessons in the units.

We were unprepared for this bout of Small Wars due to a POLICY, not doctrine, that decreed they should be ignored. Numerous people in the Army during the 1975-2002 period tried to reverse that policy to no avail. So there is a culture issue because the culture drove that policy and most within the culture subscribed to it. Culture is largely molded in organizations by personnel selection and promotion policies as well as by organizational education and training processes. If you do not fix those things, you will not change the culture. Point is that all the effective networks in being do not translate to effective training (ask the Troops...) and that they have not thus far affected the culture.

One can only hope they will...

Boom, boom, boom, ...., ...

P.S.

Sigaba is on to something with Upton. The US Army adopted all the bad aspects of the German General Staff and training systems and none of their good ones. We should have developed as US specific system and we did not; we pulled our usual trick with many things -- copied someone else's idea, engineered it until it didn't work as well, tacked on a few minor embellishments and called it our brilliant solution to the problem.

We are slow to learn...