‘LOYAL OPPOSITION’ STIFLED
MAJ. GARRI BENJAMIN HENDELL
Wednesday, February 23, 2022
The closure of the Red Team School and the impending loss of red teams from the Army division organization represent a larger shift away from intellectual humility in the Army’s way of war.
Just as in the post-Vietnam era, when the Army was able to tell itself it could finally get out of the counterinsurgency business and get back to training for the type of conflict it was more suited to fighting, the slow, spiraling end of the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gave the service an excuse to end another period of introspection in favor of a renewed focus on large-scale combat operations.
It seemed, as always, that the goal was not to improve how the Army conducted protracted operations in far-flung corners of the globe, but to simply move past those failures so the Army could concentrate on the more important, unfought notional wars of tomorrow, when the service has a better chance of prevailing within its institutional mindset: Don’t change how the Army does business, just pick the right war.
https://www.ausa.org/articles/loyal-opposition-stifled
