Bad Habits and Bad Assumptions Begat Bad Outcomes
By CDRSalamander | May 13, 2020
History is full of examples of exceptionally professional militaries who learned bad habits after long periods of overmatching opponents. Their effective habits of the recent past created significant problems when faced with more competent opponents.
A classic example was the British Army, set in its ways after decades of colonial policing actions, marched sharply in to a meat grinder during the Boer Wars. Even after that experience and the changes they brought, it took awhile to adjust to the hard lessons of wrong assumptions when the world exploded a dozen years later in 1914.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, we entered our own period of excessive overmatch with extended low-boil conflicts – with a few momentary big flare-ups – for a few decades. Some tough military fights on the tactical level, but nothing nearing even a near-peer conflict.
https://blog.usni.org/posts/2020/05/13/bad-habits-and-bad-assumptions-begat-bad-outcomes
