Training observations

[JMA]

Quick recommendation: Look at the article "Training observations" on Volume 2 Issue 1 of the Journal of Military Operations.

It's about observations after a two-week battle group* exercise (apparently Brits). It gives a nice glimpse of how difficult it is to shake off "Afghan-ism"s.

The problem only arises when you apply troops out of role. For example using armour in an infantry counter-insurgency role.

Has the British military (or the Yanks) really learned anything from the war in Afghanistan? And what if anything that they learned there must be discarded before they can get back to 'proper' soldiering playing soldiers like in the style of WW2 driving up and down in tanks?

All this again reminds me of the outstanding man and his magnificent book The Anatomy of Courage

Lord Moran wrote six months after the armistice:

The clear, war-given insight into the essence of a man has already grown dim. With the coming of peace we have gone back to those comfortable doctrines that some had thought war had killed. Cleverness has come into its own again. The men who won the war never left England; that was where the really clever people were most useful. I sometimes wonder what some of those good souls who came through make of it all. They remember that in the life of the trenches a few simple demands were made of all men; if they were not met the defaulter became an outlaw. Do they ask of themselves when they meet the successful of the present how such men would have fared in that other time where success in life had seemed a mirage? Are they silently in their hearts making those measurements of men which they learnt when there was work afoot that was a man’s work? They know a man, for reasons which they are too inarticulate to explain, and they are baffled because others deny what seems to them so simple and so sure.