dissertation help please! US military culture and small wars.

[Ken White]

Change the time period from 1950 to, say, 1792 or so and you might be onto something....

Vietnam is just a more recent example of our system failing to retain these lessons, or to emphasis the knowledge it did retain.

and you can add in large wars as well.

The problem is skill decay from non use between wars, varying opponents who suffer from the same problems and adopt different fixes for them thereby confronting us with different TTP / Operational methods and the (probably necessary) Momization, my term for excessive niceness, in civil society between wars.

ADDED:{The generational problem of rejecting all your parent's ideas is also involved -- each new generation of senior leaders seems to believe they should reject all that came before because they are better and smarter. That's not usually so but it is very American -- witness each new Administration totally rejecting all the previous Admin did and said -- and then adopting precisely the same methods and goals... END Addendum}

Add our process of one year or so tours since Korea and one is confronted with a massive 'unlearning' of muscle memory, dimming of senses and memories, fragmentation of corporate values and processes and culture and emotional switches between Momization and the particular fight of the day. Thus skill and competency shortfalls are embedded by practices designed for peace. Take that peacetime conditioned force and throw it into a fight and you have obvious problems.

Penalty of living in a democracy. It's worth it in my estimation but it is tough on those who have to fight. Luckily, enough people look at it as I did and do -- as a tolerable burden. So far...

Those problems could be fixed, obviously, by increasing Guard and Reserve strength and equipping and training them for MCO; having smaller active forces, more selective in recruiting, better trained and equipped to do the fire brigade stuff and by increasing significantly our intel and diplomatic abilities -- and, more importantly, our political will -- to preclude commitment to unnecessary and almost always counterproductive (and unduly costly in all senses) FID and SFA operations.

However, the political will to employ such a force does not exist nor is there political will to create such a force because there is no political courage to tolerate such a force. So we get to bumble along as usual.

It's the American way. Generally works out as most of our opponents are way more inept than we are. So far...