Outlaw 09,

I have painful memories of the 90s, and it wasn't just the conventional military that ignored the hard lessons related to irregular warfare. Special Forces officers were falling over themselves to demonstrate to their senior leaders that they were more conventional than the conventional army, because unconventional warfare was dead. Officers that today claim they always supported unconventional warfare, were the same ones fighting to kill our advanced HUMINT training (why would we need that?), kill our advanced urban warfare training, a few were even advocating killing our sniper program and SERE training (which actually taught you a lot about modern warfare), they killed our operations and intelligence course, which as you know was key was key to developing our future team sergeants (backbone of the ODA), got read of the Assistant Operations Sergeant position, in exchange for a specialized intelligence sergeant, they quit sending guys to advanced demolitions training, and on and on. Fortunately a few diehards resisted the dumbest proposed changes, but it didn't serve their careers well.

This mind set was based on the perceived need to conventionalize SF because UW was dead. It took a war and few years of it to get our heads right. Speaking of great leaders, I remember COL Nick Rowe well (I had the honor of him appointing me just before he went to the Philippines). He was one of the great ones, and his field of expertise went well beyond SERE. SF is making a come back, but it took a lot longer than it should have. Now that the wars have ended , we may be at risk of turning the clock back to 1994 or so.