Falling into the Adaptation Gap
David Barno and Nora Bensahel
September 29, 2020
Is the U.S. military adaptable enough to prevail in the wars of the 21st century?
We’ve spent the last four years thinking about this question, first teaching a class on military adaptation and now, at long last, publishing a book on the topic. We reviewed numerous cases of adaptation from the 20th century, examined the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and assessed the most pressing security challenges ahead. Our conclusion? We are deeply concerned that the answer is no.
Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates once noted that since Vietnam, the United States has a perfect record of predicting the next war: “We have never once gotten it right.†A 20-year U.S. war in Afghanistan would have been utterly unimaginable in early 2001, as would the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea. The range of future possibilities is simply too complicated, too dependent on unidentifiable causes, and too subject to human flaws and foibles to provide even a remote degree of confidence in most predictions.
https://warontherocks.com/2020/09/falling-into-the-adaptation-gap/
