TRADOC Losing Its Edge?

[davidbfpo]

It might be worth asking our friends in the British Army how they grew accustomed to training for vastly different operational scenarios from the late 1960s until the mid-1990s....The British experience appears to have some similarity to what the U.S. is facing today.

Pete,

Some of your points are covered in other threads such: http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=3576 and http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...read.php?t=897 Try the RFI thread ans search there.

The British Army presence eventually took a fixed shape, with garrison units serving an accompanied tour (3yrs plus), rotations for short tours (IIRC called roulement invariably from Germany), specialists and a large locally recruited Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). There were training facilities in the UK, Germany and elsewhere. It took time to get this machine "well oiled", not only over tactics, evidence-gathering. surveillance and dealing with the media.

The first thread links to a reflective paper on "lessons learned": http://www.patfinucanecentre.org/misc/opbanner.pdf (ignore the link title it is a British Army paper that is in the public domain). Hopefully that will help.