UKRAINE, GAZA, AND THE U.S. ARMY’S COUNTERINSURGENCY LEGACY
GIAN GENTILE DECEMBER 21, 2023
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fourth and final in a four-part series of articles on how national security professionals should (and should not) approach the fraught task of learning lessons from something as complex as war. We have assembled a team of sharp minds and pens in the business to apply their varying perspectives to the question opened by the Army War College’s Chase Metcalf, how do we think about learning lessons from war? It is a fitting end to 2023 and, unfortunately, will likely be essential in 2024 as well.
For the U.S. Army specifically, the lessons “learned” from previous counterinsurgency operations quickly became a kind of intellectual straitjacket during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
The wars in Ukraine and Gaza offer a laboratory of study for military professionals, historians, and analysts. Studying a current war to help organizations understand and prepare for future conflict is not new. Future U.S. Civil War Union General George B. McClellan, for example, went to Crimea in 1855 with two fellow West Point graduates to gain insights from the Crimean War for application to future combat. Ten years later, it was common for British army officers to spend time with the Confederate Army, so that they too might study operations in the American Civil War and apply what they had learned to their army back home.
In the same spirit, it makes perfect sense for American military organizations to study both the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza, and to draw insights from both.
But as the U.S. Army studies these two wars for insights, let’s drop the “learned” from the phrase “lessons learned.” Lessons learned assumes that an insight—a “lesson”—from these current wars can also, at the same time, be “learned”—that is, incorporated into the training and strategies of another military. This is a highly problematic assumption.
https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/learning-lessons-4/
