Not long after America’s withdrawal from South Vietnam, Harvard Professor Stanley Hoffmann observed that, “Of all the disasters of the last decade, the worst could be our unwillingness to learn enough from them.” The same appears true today. For all the ink spilt and bytes used, it is hard not to want to paraphrase Dr. Hoffmann and apply his witticism to America’s policy elite. So here goes: the greatest disaster about Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom is our abject inability to draw critical lessons from them.
I find myself in mild disagreement with Mark Stout’s comments on the counterinsurgency debate. The debate is certainly useful. However, it masks a larger and more important debate on the effectiveness of American policy and the strategy community, and another about the utility of force in the 21st century. We should not be distracted from these larger debates, which depend on our ability to be reflective and properly draw upon history to establish lessons.
Drawing clear lessons from post-mortems and “after action reviews” is a delicate matter because they can be politicized too readily. But it can and must be done. For an example, see the admirable Joint Staff assessment titled The Decade of War. But the military drew only operational lessons in that report. Its strongest lesson was about the “Big War” mentality that blinded the U.S. military from studying and preparing for insurgencies or small wars.
Several contributors here at WOTR have touched on the need to draw lessons carefully. Dr. David Johnson of RAND has reflected on his own experience in the post-Vietnam Army. Others, like Army Strategist Nate Finney, have also commented on the challenge, saying:
If we cannot look critically at our conflicts, how they were prosecuted, what worked and didn’t work, and what this could imply for the future, all of the concept development (think AirSea Battle and Strategic Landpower) and budget battles we are currently debating will be largely premature, if not largely uninformed.
As I noted in my review of Dr. David Ucko’s and Robert Egnell’s searing but scholarly critique of British policy and strategy making, someone in the United States needs to conduct a similar assessment of U.S. decisions and the processes that supported them. This analysis cannot just be about “President Bush’s Generals” or “Mr. Obama’s Lieutenants.” Modern conflicts, so called “wars amongst the people,” are not purely military in character, and thus we should not limit our learning and subsequent adaptations to just military lessons. American strategic performance (policymaking, bureaucratic processes, integration capacity, assessment mechanisms, Congressional oversight/advice, etc) needs the same level of dispassionate scrutiny, professional assessment, and learning as COIN theory or doctrine.
Best-selling author Tom Ricks has written about his unease with the military’s ability to deal with its shortcomings. However, the next assessment should go beyond just a study of military generalship or military issues. The challenges of modern warfare are just as pertinent to U.S. policymakers and elected officials as they are to senior military leaders. We need to ask harder and more critical questions. The critical question is not “Can the military learn from its mistakes?” We need to expand that question beyond just the military community to the entire policy and strategy making community. Thus the ultimate question is “Can American policy makers and civilian strategists learn anything from the past?”
Learning is not for the Timid
There are major lessons to be drawn out and carefully analyzed from conflicts, large and small. Yet, as Dr. Joe Collins of the National Defense University noted in the aftermath of Desert Storm, “The sages rarely remind us how difficult this learning process is. A full disclosure would show that decision makers, uniformed and civilian, often fail to learn effectively from experience.”
Our ability to learn from recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq has been hampered by a culture reticent to critically understand its own experiences and foibles. Hard-earned lessons from prior conflicts are often tucked away by our preference for more romantic regimental histories or stories of great valor. Our lack of preparedness for an emergent insurgency in Iraq in 2003 was shaped by the distorted lessons we took from the sour experience of Vietnam and the triumphalist narratives from the Gulf War, as well as our collective failure to learn from Operation Just Cause. This coup de main was a great example of a military profession that perfected an American Way of Battle at the expense of obtaining assigned political objectives.
We can and should learn from these conflicts, but we need to be aware of the abuse of history by institutions and the pervasive Masks of War worn by each of the armed services and our political camps. As Eliot Cohen has observed, “Political and military institutions can no more escape the molding hand of history than an individual can escape the influences of memory.” Each of our Services imprints a mental model of warfare on its institution and its Officer Corps. Similarly, political and academic schools of thought imprint models or lenses on civilian policy elites. We will need to “unmask” these influences and uncover the real lessons if we seek to improve our strategic performance.
Applying the Historical Mind
We need to use history very carefully when searching for lessons. Because lessons are the product of interpretation, and since history can be skewed by prejudice and parochial blinders, great care must be taken in drawing and validating lessons. Like any form of comparative analysis, case histories can be enormously insightful, but only if one is ruthlessly objective and rigorous in the development of the underlying conditions, the granular context of each case. These histories can also expose in glaring light the biases, erroneous assumptions, and poor decisions made by participants.
We will have to be better consumers of history and more selective in drawing analogies and insights. We cannot simply ransack history for immediate use to justify existing policies, paradigms or programs. In her book, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, Margaret MacMillan could have been speaking directly to Washington when she said “we only deceive ourselves, when we selectively use history to justify decisions we have already made.”
Some countries are better at the process of learning from history than others. The German military is often credited highly with its ability to learn from itself in a professional and detached manner, as noted by the historian Williamson Murray in Military Adaptation in War. An emphasis on the value of history and critical thinking even after very successful campaigns “enabled the German army to improve on success and not be blinded by it.” The Germans cultivated what Eliot Cohen has called “the historical mind,” which is built upon a solid historical footing and the capacity to ask good questions and search for disconfirming elements, rather than merely searching for comfortable or preconceived answers. The historical mind requires more than anodyne “lessons learned” on tactics and procedures. A culture of critical inquiry requires much more. What is ultimately needed is objective history with breadth, depth and context to serve as the basis for inquiry. As Professor Cohen observed:
If strategists don’t even know what happened, they cannot be sure what succeeded and what went wrong; they cannot reinforce success or remedy failures. There is then a desperate need for reliable histories as raw material for decision-making, as well as for the use of military educational institutions.
To that we can add civilian educational venues as well.
History generates few clear-cut answers, and usually offers the policymaker only ideas about good questions to raise. As Professor William Fuller has noted in Strategic Logic and Political Rationality, history is best employed “to hone our ability to think creatively about strategy. But if we try to use a recent war, or even the most recent war, to deduce universal lessons about the nature of modern war, we will most assuredly fail.” We need to understand the last decade of war, without preconceptions or political filters. To paraphrase and update MacMillan: we only deceive ourselves when we avoid using history to understand or examine decisions we made.
The kinds of questions I envision being part of a larger strategic challenge include:
- Policy Development Process. How effective has U.S. policy development been at clarifying desired end states and refining policy and strategy? Is it all driven by force of personality or dictated by unrealistic aims and untested assumptions?
- Decision-making Structure/Process. How well did the existing decision-making bodies and processes serve the development of clear options and subsequent decisions? Are procedural, structural or educational initiatives warranted?
- Unity of Effort. How effective was the U.S. Government at integrating all instruments of national power at the strategic and operational level? How well did we define the non-military capacity necessary to execute our strategy?
- Civil-Military Relations. Good civil-military relations, including trust and mutual understanding, are necessary for good strategy. How well did the interaction at the National Security Council or with the Office of the Secretary of Defense guide national or defense planning? What can be improved upon?
- Coalition Management and Host Nation Interactions. What critical lessons should be absorbed about strategic partnering and coalition management? The United States has also worked extensively with newly formed governments and host nations. What issues were raised working with these partners? What can we do better? Is the United States seen as a unilateral leader or a desirable partner in complex contingencies?
- Crafting and Communicating Narratives. How effective was the United States at crafting and delivering its narrative, to foreign and domestic audiences? What initiatives in public diplomacy or information/influence activities should be retained and what efforts taken?
- National Security Reform. The Project on National Security Reform had many proposals, but few got traction or were acted upon. What recommendations should be made to ensure that critical insights and strategic foresight are institutionalized?
We should not deceive ourselves, nor should we hide from a painful evaluation about the last 12 years and The American Way of Strategy. To make this evaluation will require not merely thinking about the past. We must look forward to a more complex world, one in which technological, social and economic change produces new contexts. As former RAND analyst Dr. Russ Glenn once noted:
Lessons from the past are of value only if molded to the needs of the future. A military that does not balance looking backward with constant glances at the future risks preparing only for the war last fought.
Likewise, a policy community that refuses to look backwards with some humility risks committing the same mistakes over and over. We cannot avoid molding our instruments of national power to the needs of the future, and to do so we must make better use of history and avoid strategic amnesia.
Frank Hoffman is a Contributing Editor at War on the Rocks. He serves as a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Strategic Research at National Defense University in Washington DC. These views are his own and do not reflect the position of NDU or DoD.
Photo credit: DVIDSHUB
Mark Thomason 
Ilhan Akcay 
Intothefog 
Jeremy Kotkin 
Florian 
Jorge Barroso 
Yes, lessons learned are vital.
BUT, those were not “small wars.”
They also were not representative of future wars.
War with any nation with access to modern weapons would not feature IEDs or permissive use of drones without AA or EW opposition. It would challenge the armor of an M1, not an MRAP. It would call for large air operations, not tempo to maintain air support in small numbers.
We ought not to prepare for another occupation. We ought not to do another occupation. We ought to prepare to fight a peer competitor, which has little to do with recent experiences.
@Mark Thomas:
I strongly disagree with your analysis, sir.
In my opinion, the wars of the next few centuries will not be wars between nations of equal standing.
Who would be the opponent of the US in such a war?
Iran? Really?
China? That country that is essential to world trade (and where the US gets a great part of its electronic supplies?
Russia? The Russia that owns Europe via its natural gas supplies?
Lesson to be learned from drones–that even if they reduce civillian casualty, the “impersonality” of it seems to really bother people more than an in person operation with larger casualties. Application: the DOD is now talking about robot soldiers, which given the lobby for new tech over boots on the ground–witness the programs-only-Congress-wants–that could happen.
On coalition management, maybe add coalition composition? If the operation is not in Europe and everyone there is European or American, is that at a gut level asking to be classed as a West on whoever match?
For not the first time, but perhaps more apparently, Congress has had a significant hand in strategy and possibly outcomes–by dropping taxes at time of war, by having “cost plus” no bid contracts that take the money needed for war, for mandating that the indigenous army have US equipment–even if they can’t afford to fix or replace it and aren’t familiar with it, mandating private contractors vs services doing the job. Sequesters have also hurt–as they have allies, who may no longer be the coalition partners in the future they were in the past.
Logistics and the unintended consequences of the supply line may be another newer lesson–we seem to have ended up funding the Pakistani and Afghan Talibans with the “tolls” we pay to get the supplies and fuel through.
The enormous cost of significant air supply is also newer–and something we didn’t quite absorb from Iraq.
Understanding and figuring out the effect of tribal loyalty and ethnic loyalty–and animosities–were something that before Iraq we’d not really had to work into our strategy, but whether it’s Mali or Burma or elsewhere it’s a factor that can arise.
The author mentions the forgetting of the lessons of Vietnam, but it appears in the rush to put Afghanistan “on the shelf” there’s almost an audible sigh of relief, a “thank goodness we can go back to regular warfare with tanks and carriers,” in many of the statements and long term projections.
On failing to plan for the next war, perhaps our increasing reliance on electronics begs our next opponents to knock out our circuits and watch us scramble as we increasingly drop the training that allows sailors and forces in the field to use non-electronic methods. Hacking and retargeting fired munitions would be another likely attack approach as “tribal actors ” have access to more sophisticated methods through the internet or may be coached by larger powers who wish to use them as proxies. The internet has worked a sea change in the acquisition of knowledge and skillsets by insurgents. At the same time it’s given them access to funding, knowlege and technical resourses, weapons sources and political support.
Our failure to interdict the flow of funding to the Taliban from the Gulf States (or of trying through pressure on the Gulf States to get them to clamp down on those who fund the Taliban) is another lesson that needs to be learned.
Not mentioned were the need to control access to weaponry of the vanquished–and what to do with indigenous allies who have their own perspective of what their nation’s reality should be after the leader or government is deposed. Note in Syria we really had no idea of what we wanted a post Assad Syria to look like, though we at least had the sense to stay out when we weren’t sure what the ultimate goals of the potential allies were. There were downsides in that we were perceived of as fence sitters. But given our existing image as cowboys who shoot first that may not be bad.
Finally, who will be the keepers of the lessons to be learned, so that five years from now we don’t forget what it was we wanted to remember and what we needed to learn the next time, as we lurch from fabricated financial crisis to postured government shutdowns and sequesters.
TBA–if the UK drastically downsizes, and Japan and Germany only moderately increase their forces, and Congress sequesters and refused to implement the war tax it should have 14 years ago, who will be the power to keep the lid on? Who will work to prevent the Bosnia’s of the future? And will the nations of the world do anything to help Africa or just look on as the center continues on it’s second fifty years of conflict and the coasts get colonialized by China?
“LEARNING LARGE LESSONS FROM SMALL WARS” is instructional and necessary question simply because we’ve made the supreme mistake of trying to use a conventional military force to essentially execute a limited counter-terror mission; we took a military force and made it do a police function instead of fighting and winning a nation’s wars. I fear our military will be struggling intellectually with the question of how to fight counterinsurgencies and ‘dirty little wars’ better at the tactical and operational level when they were mistakes of policy and strategy to begin with. We gave the military the green light to go hunt down terrorists in someone else’s civil war when, at most, it was in international police, intelligence, and SOF mission.
Though I haven’t read Murray’s book, I understand that the German Military in WW I and II was good at learning lessons at least on the tactical and operational levels. However, the German command’s ability to learn strategic and political lessons was (thankfully) very poor. Hence, the Germans didn’t recognize that their brutal COIN tactics in e.g. the Balkans strategically backfired.
So drawing on the German example doesn’t really support the acceptable argument that lessons need to be learned from small wars.
Florian: I suggest you to read “Lost Victories” written by Field Marshall von Manstein, and you will understand why the worst political government, divorced of good military leadership (generally speaking) could send the war to hell. Any resemblance with actuality may or may not be valid.
Even the best military leadership is powerless if the commander in chief is a lunatic.