Strategic Amnesia: The U.S. Army’s Stubborn Rush to Its Next War
By Kyle K. Rable
March 15, 2023
U.S. Marine Corps photo by Joel Rivera-Camacho
In the summer of 2019, I arrived at Fort Lee to start my Basic Officer Leadership Course for Quartermaster officers. At Fort Lee, I began to see the U.S. Army transition from the counterinsurgency wars to focus on the near-peer threat. Logistics officers were to move on from Forward Operating Base (FOB) procedures to learn how to conduct supply trains moving through the different fronts of a battlefield. The only problem with this was that we, a group of brand new officers, were told that we would no longer fight a counterinsurgency. This rush to move on seemed to ignore the basic understanding of learning from the past that the Army preaches.
In the headlong rush to move past Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army's preparation for near-peer conflict means failing to institutionalize the strategic lessons learned. For example, the latest update to Field Manual (FM) 3-0 mentions Ukraine 18 times while mentioning Iraq only eight times and not discussing Afghanistan at all. In the eight times Iraq is discussed in FM 3-0, none examine counterinsurgency or nation building operations. Most of the conversation in these sections is about the 2003 invasion or the support of Iraqi forces in their fight against the Islamic State (IS) in northern Iraq. By ignoring the last 20 years of fighting, the Army is failing to prepare appropriately for the more ambiguous battlefields of today. As seen by the Russian invasion of Ukraine (i.e., the failure of Russia to achieve its objectives and the way Ukraine is arming its population) unlimited and limited war definitions should be fluid. The Army has failed to fully develop a strategic understanding of counterinsurgency wars in its rush to fight the conventional war, instead focusing on tactical improvements.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/03/15/strategic_amnesia_the_us_armys_stubborn_rush_to_its_next_war_887324.html
