Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
When I did my Close Reconnaissance Commanders Course in 1990, the course was intended to prepare close reconnaissance platoons for general war against the Russians. We spent most of the course learning skills only relevant to working in Ulster.
William, you've described exactly the point I'm trying to make--rather than muddling through, at some point the Army and TRADOC have to decide what the proper mix should be for school instruction when it comes to high-intensity conventional warfare as opposed to unconventional fighting. I hesitate to say whether unconventional warfare should be called counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, irregular operations, or asymetrical warfare; what I mean are all the other graduations of the full spectrum that are less than the traditional Fulda Gap scenario. We've got to be able to be able to do all these types of warfare, and getting it right in the schoolhouse as opposed to letting things slide is our first step towards getting there.

Without doubt unconventional warfare definitely needs to be taught, but Colonel Gian Gentile's statement in the Autumn 2009 issue of Parameters about my old branch of field artillery is a case in point: "In 2008, three U.S. Army colonels, all former brigade commanders in Iraq, told Army Chief of Staff General George Casey that after seven years of population-centric counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army's field artillery branch had lost the ability to fight and had become a "dead branch walking."