Learning Large Lessons From Small Wars by Frank Hoffman, War on the Rocks
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…
Comments
Re: Learning.
Possibly the most humbling and important lesson that we seem to have learned re: our recent activities is that we absolutely CANNOT plan and execute operations:
a. Thinking that we need only "liberate" populations from their "oppressive" regimes.
b. Expecting that the populations of these countries would, thereafter, easily, quickly and, mostly on their own (1) throw off their alternative ways of life and ways of governance and (2) adopt, in the place of these, our modern western ways.
This "end of history"/"universal values" thinking -- and the planning and execution of not only military operations but, indeed, foreign policy based on same -- this seems to have rendered tragic results.
It was such concepts as these, I would suggest -- and not so much RMA and/or Big War thinking -- that led us to plan and execute operations that:
a. Downplayed, marginalized and/or eliminated the so-called "human factor" and caused us to
b. Concentrate on dealing with and defeating only the contrary regime and its military forces (and not also, as in days past, the country's contrary population).
Huge, huge, shall we say, egotistic and ethnocentric mistake.
Our understanding of this mistake helping to explain, for example, the reinstatement of the "human domain"/the "human factor" into both foreign policy and military operations planning and thinking.
Given the importance of the lesson learned, maybe even the new, soon to be released National Security Strategy of the United States will reflect such learning.
This frames the question well: "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?'
I am not sure that the policy makers want to learn anything. The questions they would have to ask about forcibly spreading democracy would inevitably lead the question of whether democracy is the best form of government - one that must be universally accepted. For policy makers that question was answered with the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are not apt to reopen that debate. So they will let this one be, allowing the blame to rest on failures of Army COIN doctrine rather than on a policy that advocates spreading democracy in tribal societies.