The Journey of Introspection, Learning, Problem Solving, Teaching, and Training
Perhaps you are coming home from your fourth tour to either Iraq or Afghanistan. Or maybe you are a Green Beret who has spent the last decade in the quiet wars of the Philippines and Colombia? In either case, you might be spending a significant amount of time processing your experiences. What have you learned? What did you do right? What did you do wrong? If you have found your way to Small Wars Journal, then you have found a venue where you can share your experiences and learn from what others have done in the past in other environments.
This process of introspection can be unnerving as you have to learn to see the world as it is not as you wished it to be. If you worked in a particularly violent area, then your experiences may take a bit longer to work through. This situation is quite normal. Emerson tells us that this journey is necessary for wisdom, and we should, "Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old."
Next, you may decide to tell your story, writing and publishing to add to the collective narrative of warfare in the past decade. John Collin's Warlord's Writing Tips offers excellent advice on structure and flow, and Dave Maxwell's A Recommendation for Quiet Professionals cautions you to temper your tone with both humbleness and sincerity in order to properly share the valor and sacrifices of the men and women that you've commanded.
Now that you've shared your story and completed introspection, the military is going to prepare you to become a field grade officer or non-commissioned officer. You may be preparing to become an executive or operations officer. Or, the military is preparing you for the positions of command sergeant major or team sergeant. What are you likely to experience?
If the military sends you to West Point, a training center, or schoolhouse, then you are tasked with teaching basic military tactics and procedures. You may be exploring how to better teach and train venturing away from Tasks, Conditions, and Standards (TCS) and moving to more collaborative and developmental Outcome Based Training and Education (OBT&E) that is results driven rather than process driven.
If the military sends you to Monterey, then Dr. Nancy Roberts may introduce you to the concept of Wicked Problems. There, you will learn how others are solving difficult problems in time-constrained, resource-limited environments. Among these approaches, you will be exposed to how companies like Apple, Google, and others operate.
When the military sends you to Fort Leavenworth, then you will be exposed to design theory, a heuristic tool described in detail here. You will have to determine the utility of these methods for yourself, but they are a bridge of merging your practice back to the theory. In the proper combination, they can help you become a more thoughtful leader.
Finally, perhaps the greatest wisdom is learning that you are not the first person to experience war. Paul Yingling and Gian Gentile constantly remind us that there is nothing new under the sun, and we can learn and relearn from the past. This realization lends to a call for a renewed and refocused effort towards studying military history. After your time in combat, you now have the ability to better understand what the great authors of the past were trying to teach us.
In the end, I suppose that this journey is a process not a destination. As the SWJ challenge coin proudly proclaims, "Historia Magistra Vitae Est- History is the best teacher." While you're in deep thought over my writings, consider donating to the cause to keep our movement in motion.
Bottom Line- Keep Writing, Keep Thinking, and Keep Learning.
Comments
There are new things;…
There are new things; nuclear weapons are not merely larger bombs; they vary in sort. I only slightly disagree with you on your "nothing new under the sun" remark. That said, the realpoint of your argument - with which I totally agree - is that we must learn from redactle experience, ours and others. Santayana was correct in that regard.
That not much is new I certainly agree. I suspect it may well be a generational effort to repair much of the "everything is changed" damage (and by then, who knows, some of those positions may actually come to fruition).
I would add, however, that for all of the "change" being applied to the area of insurgency, most of it is being built upon a "flat earth society" perspective shaped by Western Colonial and Containment intervention experiences. So, while I do challenge many long held "conventional wisdoms" on insurgency, I do not do so based on a argument that it is because insurgency has changed, but rather because advances in information technology are serving to expose flaws in how we have come to think about this dynamic in the West over the past couple of hundred years.
But as Mike says, first we must think, share, debate and discuss these things; and that means being able to 'paint outside the lines' without fear of reprimand. This is true for institutions as well as individuals. Service colleges cannot be constrained by the current positions of their respective services if they are going maximize their potential in educating the force.
Einstein once said "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." Obviously Einstein was not in the military. We are not only constrained by what we are told is true, but also by what we are told is right.
Cheers!
Bob
Mike,
The obvious answer is that of course our thinking must change. But the problem is that the obvious is not alway right. We need to determine first, what is really new (not much), second, how that affects what we need to do, and third, to what extent our thinking must change.
I tend to see issues in terms of 3 levels: th lowest is the routine and we have SOPs for those; next come issues that require adaptive responses - more of putting together new mixes of various SOPs; then come the problems that present smething really new that cannot be resolved merely by adaptation and require truly innovative solutions. While few, those are the realy hard ones and knowing which is which is plenty difficult.
John
Thanks All.
The intent of this posting was to describe in simple form some of the current difficult discussions at SWJ and encourage others to tell their story.
It is also the beginning of a larger SWJ Training and Education Inquiry that is forthcoming.
Chris is spot on, and I would add that fiction is sometimes a better method of telling truth.
John, if we accept that things change, then must our thinking change as well?
Mike
Mike--
Excellent essay as Chris says. Of course, you write from experience. Concur with Chris about fiction as well as non-fiction.
I take issue with you only a little on your "nothing new under the sun" comment - there are new things; nuclear weapons were not just bigger bombs, the differ in kind. That said, the realpoint of your argument - with which I totally agree - is that we must learn from experience, ours and others. In tht sense, Santayana was right.
Hoohah!
JohnT
Mike,
This is really a profound posting and I really liked your essay!
And we should not ignore the power of writing war "fiction" which tends to have links to reality but reads as a novel.
Think of James Webb's "Fields of Fire"
Josiah Bunting's "The Lionheads"
Anton Myrer's "Once an Eagle"
W.E.B. Griffin's Brotherhood of War series
and so on...
These no doubt can help shape the emotional being of the soldier/Marine in ways where history cannot.
Positivity, a few writers explained, is what a soldier needs in order to do the job he's asked to do. But history tells otherwise. Men in war are motivated by the most proximate of perspectives. Mao said it well: A SOLDIER IS LIKE A FROG LOOKING AT THE SKY FROM THE BOTTOM OF A WELL-- the broader scene is totally missing in his focus until its... .and then he may just want to quietly forget about it for a while.
This issue was not much in debate during the Vietnam War. If anything, most soldiers came to recognize that counter-insurgency requires a very broad horizon and exhibited it fully, though in "defeat." The question now is: how wide and deep is the perspective of a "professional"?
McNamara as SecDef felt that the Joint Chiefs were rather dull-witted and dishonest but never said it publicly, just to his "whiz kids" serving under him. He was determined to impose statistics on the military in order to make it a "military science." "Blowtorch" Komer decried the bureaucratism of the CORDS civilian sector. But, in fact, that was because he expected so much more from such people supposedly schooled in social sciences. AS for the military, he was not charitable with that side of CORDS.
Now we've been at war for a decade in the ultimate fight against shadow warriors. While VC/NVA sappers would accept slim odds in operations, the new enemy shahids has been on a one way mission from the start. And, our current crop of "professionals" can in no way claim to have come out on top as they in no way intend to work by the same standards of "martyrdom." And yet, unlike during the JFK era, it's not civilians but the military establishment that's been in charge for a decade now and it shows. Gentile and other colonels have been rather cruel with the generals. But the fact may be that without a draft a volunteer military does not often get the best and brightest. Maybe the "quiet professionalism" is neither quiet nor professional. We have an outcome based analysis to face and we can either wait for history to deal with this two decades from now, when the "thanks for your service" pros are helpless old men who can't argue back with historians, or begin a meaningful dialogue soon while facing pink-slips and an outcome based demeaning.
This decade has been a boondoggle based on exactly the same principle as the "social revolution of the 60s"-- the more money you throw at it, the quicker and better the outcome. Well, it just ain't so. And, after Obama amputates the Pentagon and ties up its cash aorta, it will be a matter of "leaks" that ever more dull the sheen of the current "professional" shine.
And still, the "professional" glow is defended with one last stand before Petraeus is muzzled at CIA, demanding extra points for patriotic willingness to put one's life on the line. Well, so do coal miners and no one hails them as professionals despite their importance to American energetics.
The pretension that some sort of cognitive genius characterizes the volunteer, will soon be retrospectively read as "people with nowhere else to go," as military pros were read in the 60s. Military "arts" ain't rocket science and the hubris with which a lot of brass hides its responsibility for the outcome under the incredible capacity for "secret" classification of the Pentagon will never evade Cleo's (Muse of History) scrutiny. She wont settle for perpetuating the "fog of war" excuse. This last decades of warfare was full of high roller spending someone elses money with little bang for the buck-- FACT!
The real question is whether the pomp and self-congratulatory cover should be ripped off with their own analysis by the "professionals" themselves by THEY starting the MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE, thus making sure their perspective gets due recognition instead of being eclipsed by accounts of the Petraeus game of political bullying by a sequence of Commander and Chief. Such an initiative will avoid Woodward making it their last stand as they try to reroute the outcome based historical analysis to come.
A sequence of presidents proving to be incredibly unprepared for the responsibilities required of the Commander and Chief office sent our all-volunteer army to war intel blind, language deaf and culture dumb--TWICE-- engaging in photo-op "mission accomplished" perpetual campaigning while most Americans "disconnected" telling themselves: ain't my kid going to war. The lessons of "DERELICTION OF DUTY" turned into something as self-serving to the careerists as it was at the time covered by "DERELICTION OF DUTY." So we are now facing the possibility of this other decade of warfare that ends as miserably as Vietnam but this time the politicians will claim, for the record, that the military was given carte blanche. It was left for a few colonels to analyze our Vietnam war from a military perspective while the commanders all retired quietly to their boardroom seats. Consequently, many of Vietnam's worst errors were repeated in the last decade enabling some to insist that the "professionals" cannot learn.
So far, all through this decade, professionals chose pomp and circumstance, commenting mostly on friendly venues. Yet the debate, we forget, was begun by a brave reservist who confronted SecDef Rumsfeld in Iraq speaking for the 50% of the expeditionary force that had enlisted on assurance that they'll owe only one week a month and one month a year in return for paid college tuition and call-up only in case of fire, flood or invasion of the homeland. Instead, 30-something moms and dads suddenly faced "stop-loss" and demands for performance equal to that of the real professionals.
The "thanks for your service," the hype and the recognition of "professionalism" all gradually prove to be hoopla as the vets suffer ever more cuts in promises made, just like after Vietnam. Commanders who thought themselves king of the hill will now face the same indiscriminate and merciless pink slip as did so many after Vietnam. In the end, as people forget who were Clinton, Bush and Obama, they will remember that it's "our" Medicare or their war and VA, we cant afford both!
This war academics were quie--leaving it to hungry young think-tak propagandistst-- mostly because, frankly my dear, academics didn't give a damn. So, when "who lost....?" will become a topic of scholarship, the "professionals" will suffer mercilessly. This can be avoided if the Nagl assumptions are laid aside and an honest debate of the process is promoted. ROLLING STONE recently has suggested that in the minds of commanders lying is a legit "psyops" tactic as if anything to gain more time is smart. In the meantime, much in print proves that not to be true. The lying becomes a cross that a lot of innocent pros are forced to bear, even though it mostly originated way above their pay grade.
There was a time when VIETNAM VETERANS AGAINST THE WAR and VIETNAM VETERANS FOR A JUST PEACE shared the podium in constructive meaningful dialogue. On almost all occasions it proved to be an amazingly productive analysis--thesis- antithesisïÆ' synthesis, even though most of the vets on both sides were not "professionals" but draftees. Because they ALL cared so much, they all studied, analyzed and spoke truth without personal insults, squabbles and lying as psyop. Alas, by then less and less people cared anymore, it was over. Then came 9/11 and the Big Lie began with covering-up for the reckless airlines by speaking as if binLaden could walk on water. Now he is dead and so is the Pentagon bigness that Rummy built. The pros will soon be the unemployed and the nation will be merciless towards these "looooosers." If America did it once, it can do it again. Rather than seek maintaining their glow through psyops, the pros would do well to hold the "ain't my kid going to war" Americans accountable through humble and honest meaningful dialogue rather than Hellfire and Brimstone ooorah. War on Terror vets, on average, were five years older than Vietnam vets so they almost all have kids who will ask: what did you do in the war daddy? "Go study our scholarship on it" would be a lot better legacy than hopeless attempt to prolong the psyops to then. Disabled/dead ratio is ten times what it was in Vietnam. We must make sure that the helpless warriors are not left to rot.