Failure to Learn: Reflections on a Career in the Post-Vietnam Army by David Johnson, War on the Rocks
The legacy and future of American counterinsurgency remains perhaps the most contentious issue in contemporary military affairs. Many punches have been thrown in this raucous debate in key online publications, most notably Small Wars Journal, the late Abu Muqawama, and here at War on the Rocks. WOTR’s Mark Stout caused quite a stir with his article on “Why the Counterinsurgency Debate Must Go On.” Critics focused their fire and ire on his caution that the Army must not do what it did after the Philippine Insurrection and the Vietnam War, when it “consciously decided to forget. It locked the records away and pretended that nothing had ever happened.”
How did the Army deal with the Vietnam War? And how did this experience inform the controversial Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency (FM 3-24)? These are questions with which I have some personal experience from my career as an Army officer. These questions have also framed my research as a historian in the Army and at RAND…
Comments
Madhu, consider that...all considered...countering an insurgency (aka putting down an insurrection, rebellion, bandits, etc etc etc) has been a problem since on or about the beginning of civilization. I am not being trite or sarcastic. This is the THE problem Armies of civilized nations have had to deal with most of the time. In fact, I'd argue that it is the norm of warfare.
I am starting to believe that the problem you and the original article are trying to describe is a rather complex one. Sure there is a fair bit of anti-intellectualism. There is also a fair bit of pedestrian "intellectualism" masquerading as deep thought. There is also a non-trivial superiority complex. That is not to say that military professionals need to be overly concerned with what the layman thinks of military topics. But it is to say that the military professional believes that his technical proficiency is directly proportional to his intellectual capacity and problem solving skills. Alas, the two are rarely correlated.
I think part of the answer lies in the two industrial age (and heavily Prussian) legacies. The first is the belief that warfare can be distilled into a set of discreet technical tasks and processes. Indeed, industrial warfare had magnified the significance of technical tasks and the skills and the processes needed to orchestrate them. But that development did not reduce the conduct of war to the conduct of set piece battles. Ironically, The Prussian himself recognized war's political dimension, but that lesson still barely gets lip service.
The second is the belief that the professional military man is only concerned with military matters, defined as the technical tasks and processes. Alas, given that this very definition suffers from the first belief I just mentioned, it leaves the military man looking at his problems through the proverbial straw.
And so here we are. An article that epitomizes the technocratic wages of industrial military thought. And an entire forum devoted to the debate about the aperture of that straw.
Maybe my comments weren't so terrible given that one is still here.
I'll try this again..
The two main categories of military members interested in counterinsurgency:
1. Those that think the Army is too conventionally minded and should to change its mindset from its old "Fulda Gap" days. This conversation is Army-centric, American-centric, and directed inward. In this mindset, the Army forgetting lessons of Vietnam represents--there is no nice way to say this--the sum total of knowledge about counterinsurgency, counterrevolution, insurgency, small wars, civil wars, and the like.
Perhaps this is an exaggeration but it often seems as if this group is not very interested in the world outside of its own idea of the Army. It seems to me to be more about a certain feeling that the Army needs to be more sophisticated and conventional guys aren't sophisticated. Plus, we keep dealing with stabilization and insurgency, so we should know about it.
This would be fine if as much attention was devoted to the world outside the Army. The study of counterinsurgency or counterrevolution never stopped in academia, or, indeed, in the broader world. Karl Hack and Chin Peng. The Indians and Pakistanis and Chinese and subconventional warfare. Intelligence scholars like Calder Walton writing about declassified documents from British imperial small wars and how this might change current understanding. Australian and Canadian scholars writing about the Anglo-American alliance and its effects. Non-Anglophone European literature. And so on. A vast literature, almost completely ignored by some so-called counterinsurgency proponents.
These folks are, at times, the so-called coindinistas; not always, but sometimes.
2. A second group, often retired, has long been interested in small wars, may have fought in more than one, and is interested in the subject through the lens of regions: Latin American, South East Asia, etc. This group seems to have kept up with the larger literature in history, political science, social science, and even the arts, although often focused on a particular personal experience.
This group would like the Army to remember that it did have good doctrine and studied these subjects quite well in the past through things like SORO, etc.
I am painting with too broad a brush and being too critical as usual but I think the general categories hold even if the particulars may not be correct in all ways.
Really, for me, the key difference between the two groups is an inward vs an outward orientation and a general lack of curiosity about the world in one group, while a great interest in the other, albeit in the realm of one's own experience (which is fine).
The world outside the Army turns, it moves, it breathes, it lives, and it consists of more than PhDs at schools of public policy or the Peace Institute, or Yale, or what have you. So much has been written about Malaya-- foundational scholarship--that never made it into the many of the articles I read here over the years in various online journals.
So, in a way, both so called coindinista and contra are correct - a lot of forgetting went on, both in the conventional and unconventional world and this has been aided and abetted by a contractor class of intellectuals of varying quality, including the subpar. It's out there, the world. It might be nice to be genuinely interested in it outside of the same few categories the national security class has carved out over the years.
Can the SWJ editors please delete my comment? I can't edit it and it isn't an entirely fair comment. I think the reason I got confused (which doesn't excuse the irritability or rudeness of my comment) is that the author says all the right things about expanding the study of counterinsurgency, and, yet, says the same old thing about Afghanistan, about inadequate resourcing and whole-of-government. It's confusing in this way.
No, the critics ire is differently directed. Once again, for the millionth time:
There are many arguments about the American Army and counterinsurgency.
1. One is institutional and has to do with how much money, time, attention and men/women the institution should devote to counterinsurgency readiness. The old conventional versus unconventional argument.
2. The second is consistently missed in the conversation by counterinsurgency proponents. The argument I am making--and many others around here, and more formally in academia--is that those interested in counterinsurgency have provided thin intellectual gruel and lack all creativity in approaching a subject that is supposedly of great interest.
If counterinsurgency is so important for the American Army, then why is there so little intellectual ferment?
There are a million ways to study how to counter an insurgency--or its effects--as a second or third party. But all I get is the same few conflicts studied in the same three or four ways and the same old topics retread and retread and retread.
What some are asking is for you to bring it intellectually - the old counterinsurgents didn't keep up with the latest literature, had ahistorical and frankly incorrect information, and basically told themselves a bunch of stories about how we should have fought in Vietnam and substituted this gut impression for a deep, rigorous and intellectually tough approach to a practical issue.
It's a shame Gian Gentile didn't follow up on a paper in Foreign Policy from about 2009 or 2010 (or maybe he did and I missed it). He basically said that the US military should have doctrinal options, so that CT and classical COIN and occupation policing, etc, should all be considered equally as potential ways to deal with an insurgency in another country.
You don't have to agree with the specifics to see the power of the approach. Look, why approach the problem in the same way every time? And why is some of the literature so thin?
It's complicated. I'm not suggesting it's easy in practice or that the future is possible to predict. All I am asking is that people show a little intellectual passion when approaching a discipline for study. Expand the cases. Radically. Study different populations. Read more widely. Use non-Western academics and non-English literature.
I don't know. Just don't give me the same three things over and over and over again. If it's important, study it like it's important.
I know I am being polemical and unfair, but, come on, it's me. We are what we are. Another important life lesson....