The Briefing Room
General Category => Military/Defense News => Topic started by: rangerrebew on March 09, 2019, 08:34:10 am
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The US Army Is Trying to Bury the Lessons of the Iraq War
By Frank Sobchak Co-author, "The U.S. Army in the Iraq War" Read bio
March 8, 2019
By scuttling plans to help its leaders understand what went wrong, the service is turning a blind eye to insights of enduring relevance.
U.S. troops are still in Iraq — not to mention Syria, Afghanistan, and various African countries — to ward off or put down insurgencies. Within the national security apparatus, however, the Iraq War is old news.
As has been explained to me by senior officers who are still on active duty, the conventional wisdom today is that our military has moved on — and in an odd redux, they note that we have returned to the philosophy of 1973. Similar to how the Pentagon abandoned its doctrine of fighting counterinsurgencies and irregular conflicts in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, today’s military has shifted away from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of preparing to fight insurgents and guerrillas, our security establishment has refocused almost exclusively on the realm of great power conflict — in their parlance, peer or near-peer competitors such as Russia or China.
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/03/us-army-trying-bury-lessons-iraq-war/155403/?oref=d-river (https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/03/us-army-trying-bury-lessons-iraq-war/155403/?oref=d-river)
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It’s not that this is a big change, it’s just that the pace of deployments has slowed for the first time in 15 years to allow the training for a near peer competitor