COL G said:That is a consideration worth thinking about. One I think we might kill some brain cells over if we consider how it shakes out.I see the "using" of history as dangerous because it produces a mindset of the templating of the past into lessons and principles to be plucked at will for "use" in the present. But in so doing this you end becoming a-historical in the sense that by detaching these lessons from their historical moorings and plotting them in the present you remove them from their context.
If I understand your concern its that the affect of Niel attributing his success to the application of what "N" "learned" from reading "K" is that others may also reach first for "K" (or "G" for Galula) or by extension the writings of those who attribute some of or all of their success to K or G exclusively to the lessons available from others, and that the danger in so doing is that they will see every problem as one being one in which a K, G or N solution will work without consideration of context.How would it seem if some brigade or division commander right after the march up to Baghdad said that before the assault he had re-read his Jomini, realized that it had been overlooked in the American Army for the past 20 years, applied its Principles in the assault, and as a result of applying those principles the march up to Baghdad in Spring 2003 was a great success?
What makes this more difficult is Niel's lamentation and frustration that there was no body of knowledge in his PME to that point that introduced him to the theory of COIN, and he was left to find it himself, and build one piecemeal. Part of Niel's argument is that the actions taken by leaders that allowed COIN education and training to be omitted from his PME to that point left him only partially prepared to do the mission(s) he was given. His highlighting of "K"s work is less an endorsement of its answer to all the challenges Niel faced as much as it is an indictment of a Institutional deficit of knowledge that he required in order to frame his thoughts and guide some of his actions during his mission.
It is a strong indictment from Niel's (and from mine) perspective given that many of the leaders who'd determined our DOTMLPF path between the years and the omission of a COIN body of knowledge had also been in Vietnam, were aware of other insurgencies before and after Vietnam and would seem to be in a better position to identify the gaps. This in my view means there were deliberate choices made, and for whatever reasons, they left a hole where that knowledge should have been.
As such our military leaders made a decision, that seems to me based not only on priorities associated with the enemy of the time, but with the enemy of choice. Where there was an opportunity to consider our involvement in Vietnam from a number of angles and build that knowledge into our understanding of how we might be called on to employ military force and national power together for an end, we chose otherwise. We left a couple of empty slots on our PME bookshelf, and Niel filled it the best way he could.
The lesson I take from Niel's very good essay is that when enough of the leadership is willing to believe the truth as they think it should be, the institution has a way of facilitating their delusion and then strengthening it to the point it is near unassailable. The result is that when reality proves the preferred truth is a fallacy, it makes adapting to reality harder than it has to be, we place more risk to the political objective, and Niel has to go find "K" with dust all over him on the library shelf, not knowing if "K" is really applicable or not because as far as the institution is concerned, he is an unknown value. When Niel finds out that "K" worked out OK for him, he has an obligation in my view to let others know and fill the hole until our institution catches up and fills the slots. Leaving the hole is just as wrong now as it was then.
I'm finding this to be true as well when people say we are "highly" unlikely to fight our way into our out of a place in large scale MCO situations. How do they know that? Do the think its always up to them? Where can I get their crystal ball, and will those folks be around to own up when reality calls them on their prognosis? That is the thing about war an politics, it never seems to go exactly like you thought it would, and there seems to be an awful lot of unanticipated requirements. I understand risk, but education is an area that we can at least give ourselves a leg up in. Choosing an alternate reality is a good way to come up short at the wrong time.
I'd say read as much History as you can get your hands on, and think critically about how the experience of others applies to your requirements. COL G is correct about the danger of "templating" but that danger extends beyond the history written by others - ground truth changes with time and geography and what worked well last month in one place, may not be so good next month in another place as moods and people change things. We see this right now as we consider Iraq as it relates to Afghanistan. However, we also believe that somethings are more common, and as such lend them to imperatives.
In hunting, most game animals need water, food and habitat. People have requirements as well and our understanding of those requirements as they relate to the context of the conditions can help us do our job as long as we acknowledge what is different and continue to look for what changes. I never got much of that in my PME or training before 2004. JRTC provided a taste of it, but even then the enemy was free to take actions that he did not really have to live with - if he got shot he just went back to Geronimo land, and at the end of the rotation we were all buds - hell he might even wind up in my unit. Our own society did not reflect it very well either, because even though there is some violence, some issues of security and some tension, it is relatively small and regulated in most of America. The DOTMLPF systems we'd designed to prepare us for the war we preferred to consider created a culture that could almost exclusively see only those things and largely insulated us from the one we had to go fight. Niel's article bears witness to that in my view.
We should not have an educational approach in our PME which espouses a selected reading of war, because then we get a selected understanding and institutional inbreeding. Instead, we need to cover the full range and cycle of war from the causes of conflict, the requirements of war, the politics during war, and the reasons for which temporary and lasting peaces occur - and then why they go bad. This way we will be better able to understand where we are at a given time and make better decisions about how to get to where we'd rather be, and because this is the reality we are faced with when we get called to go do our jobs.
Best, Rob
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