“Basically, after Vietnam, the general attitude of the American military was that we don’t want to fight that kind of war again,” said Conrad C. Crane, the director of the military history institute at the Army War College, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and one of the principal drafters of the new doctrine. “The Army’s idea was to fight the big war against the Russians and ignore these other things.”
A common assumption was that if the military trained for major combat operations, it would be able to easily handle less violent operations like peacekeeping and counterinsurgency. But that assumption proved to be wrong in Iraq; in effect, the military without an up-to-date doctrine. Different units improvised different approaches. The failure by civilian policy makers to prepare for the reconstruction of Iraq compounded the problem.
I touched on this issue in this post, as part of my ongoing futile attempt to combat the ubiquitous "If only we'd listened to St. Colin of the Fields and his sainted Powell Doctrine everything would be coming up roses" meme, which people who know nothing about the military seem to think is the be-all and end all to everything. The half vast editorial staff have heard more than a few folks in the combat arms wryly refer to the "CYA Doctrine" as an excuse never to fight a war anywhere, under any circumstances, because we'll never have enough troops in today's military. It's a joke, but it's also not too far from the truth.
Read the whole thing...
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