Once again, the Army comes up to a problem representing an external threat which does not play to its preferred COA of force on force attrition,
  • goes through a lot of pain in coming to grips with the fact that it does not like to do small wars and working non-kinetic solutions

  • says its got to get smart on training for COIN and training will be the solution to all the inadequacies of the current force

  • says learning about other cultures is an important part of COIN and we need to do it


And finally forgets that it too has a culture and a system which fosters that culture, and that culture with its underlying system lead it in great part, to the situation it finds itself in when kinetic operations cease and then it is "now what?".

But no worries, we'll train ourselves out of this problem. We'll forget about Force Management, OPMS, Branches, the Senior Rater driven OER with its total subjectivity, career "tracks". In a word we will forget about OPMS politics and through training alone we will overturn (permanently) deeply entrenched institutional biases and their underlying often unspoken cultural prejudices.


I have a bridge....it is in Brooklyn

SB