363. Other People’s Wars: The US Military and the Challenge of Learning from Foreign Conflicts

[rangerrebew]

Posted on October 28, 2021 by user
363. Other People’s Wars: The US Military and the Challenge of Learning from Foreign Conflicts

[Editor’s Note:  Army Mad Scientist is pleased to feature our latest episode of The Convergence podcast, with Brent L. Sterling, Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and author of Other People’s Wars: The US Military and the Challenge of Learning from Foreign Conflicts, discussing how militaries learn (or don’t!) from foreign conflicts, what pitfalls await those trying to learn from historical conflicts, how focusing only on “relevant” observations hampers our creativity in analyzing warfare, and what strategists can do to avoid past mistakes.  Enjoy! (Please note that this podcast and several of the embedded links below are best accessed via a non-DoD network due to network priorities for teleworking)]

[If the podcast dashboard is not rendering correctly for you, please click here to listen to the podcast.]

Brent L. Sterling has been an adjunct lecturer at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University for the past twenty years, teaching courses on security studies, military strategy, and operations. He is the author of Other People’s Wars: The US Military and the Challenge of Learning for Foreign Conflicts and Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors? What History Teaches Us about Strategic Barriers and International Security. Dr. Sterling has spent the past thirty years as a defense analyst, including positions at the Central Intelligence Agency and consulting firms working for the U.S. Department of Defense.

In our interview with Dr. Sterling, we discuss how militaries learn (or don’t!) from foreign conflicts, what pitfalls await those trying to learn from historical conflicts, how focusing only on “relevant” observations hampers our creativity in analyzing warfare, and what strategists can do to avoid past mistakes. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview:

https://madsciblog.tradoc.army.mil/363-other-peoples-wars-the-us-military-and-the-challenge-of-learning-from-foreign-conflicts/

[sneakypete]

Nothing even the tiniest bit new about this. I actually talked with one of the men that was sent into China after the Japanese invasion,to view and estimate the ability of the Free Chinese to work with the Communist Chinese to beat the Japanese invaders.

It has been a long time and I have forgotten his name,but I THINK they went in "incognito" with nothing to identify them as US Soldiers,or even as Americans. Their mission was to observe and report,not necessarily take part in any fighting if they could avoid it.

I do believe that armies from European nations were doing this right here in America,before America even existed as a nation.