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.

The American military is exceptionally competent at learning tactical lessons, developing new ways to fight on the ground while producing better equipment. However, the American military consistently fails to maintain lessons learned past the tactical level of command. The current rush of the military to move past its failures of the last 20 years is reminiscent of the rush to do so post-Vietnam. American military strategic culture has consistently lacked the connection with the formulation of policy. This culture, discussed in depth in works such as Russell Weigley’s The American Way of War and Donald Stoker’s Why America Loses Wars, maintains its stranglehold on American strategists today.[1]

To understand this strategic amnesia and rushing to the next war, this paper will briefly examine the war with the largest impression on the military, World War II. It will continue from there to the Afghanistan withdrawal. This article suggests a continuity in how quickly the Army moves towards the next fight. This paper then explores the reasons behind the loss of institutional knowledge, building off the historical analysis to show how the Army fails to adapt and reassess.

Historical Background

World War II

World War II began when the imperial Japanese Army invaded Manchuria in 1931, and Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939.[2] America remained a non-combatant until the 7 Dec 1941 Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The American military mobilized more force than ever before, fighting from the deserts of North Africa to the island of Okinawa. The trials and tribulations of World War II are remembered fondly; every Army cadet reads Band of Brothers at least once before commissioning. However, the victory disease from the war continues to infect today.[3]

The history of World War II continues to dominate the learning institutions of the Army because it was so clearly won, in myth.[4] Large tank battles, control of the air, domination of the sea, movie-worthy airborne drops, and daring amphibious assaults are the highlighted stories of the war. While the war does deserve a place in the U.S. Army’s institutional memory, it is also important to remember what has changed. What followed the victories of WWII should have diminished the impact it had on the U.S. Army, yet it has remained on a pedestal. The stalemate and failure of the next two major wars are direct consequences of the victory disease brought on by WWII.

The Korean War

As World War II ended and relations between the communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the United States soured, the Cold War began. Soon China fell into the grip of communism. As the world spiraled closer to the possibility of all-out nuclear war, North Korea crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea, setting off the Korean War.[5] North Korea's initial push was explosive and might have culminated in the desired quick decisive victory if not for the quick deployment of U.S. and United Nations troops. In the seesaw events of the Korean War, the U.S. and North Korean/Chinese troops launched massive offensives. These culminated when U.S. troops regrouped and methodically pushed back the combined Chinese/North Korean forces and halted at the 38th parallel.

This was America’s first true lesson on limited war in the post-war period. American forces had to deal with hostile locals as they moved past the 38th parallel. The U.S. oversimplified the Chinese attack as hordes of Chinese soldiers, yet the attacks against U.S. lines were organized and pointed at breaking the defense at multiple spots. The U.S. also failed to understand how important cultural understanding was, it did not know that the occupation of U.S. troops had a negative impact on the newly formed South Korean government.[6] In continuing to rush to the next war, the Army never institutionalized the lessons learned.

The American War in Vietnam

The decolonization struggle between the Vietnamese and the French colonial government took on a Cold War framing. Once the French failed in Vietnam, the U.S. supported South Vietnam. The U.S. slowly escalated involvement until the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, which led to the United States committing full combat troops to South Vietnam. The U.S. military failed to ever realize its nation building and counterinsurgent mission in South Vietnam. The military overused its firepower, failed to pacify the countryside, and failed to understand the culture. Under General William Westmoreland and General Creighton Abrams, the military emphasized the statistical measurement of body counts and other arbitrary statistics.[7] It was a war that held an elusive enemy that fought in unconventional ways, sometimes as conventional units from the North and sometimes as communist insurgents from the South. After many years of failing to pacify South Vietnam, the U.S. pulled out its combat forces in 1973, and in 1975 the Saigon Government fell.

The American war in Vietnam has had resounding implications on the wars that followed; however, the U.S. Army failed to learn lessons from Vietnam. As seen above, the U.S. Army failed to fully institutionalize lessons learned because it is always in a rush to move on. The Army did not believe it could learn much from a war it lost and predicted that it still needed to only face the Russian Army in large-scale combat. The Army failed to come to terms with its shortcomings, instead pretending that Vietnam was a one-off. The idea of the Vietnam Syndrome shows that the Army thought of the war only as its loss and not as a way to develop better counterinsurgency doctrine.

The End of the Cold War, Desert Storm, and GWOT

In the aftermath of Vietnam, the Army was disgraced by its loss in Vietnam, failed further during the botched Desert One rescue attempt, and fell into a malaise. However, under President Ronald Reagan, the military worked towards ending the malaise of failure. As it participated in small operations, such as Operation Just Cause, it began to feel its might again. Two major events occurred that imparted the Army with victory disease so rancid that it contributed to the failure of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The first major event was the success of the U.S. mission during Operation Desert Storm from August 1990 to February 1991. In repelling, routing, and utterly demoralizing the Iraqi Army, the U.S. Army felt it had finally kicked the Vietnam War syndrome. Unfortunately, America was drunk on its military victory and forgot the loss of Vietnam. The second event was the dissolution of the USSR and the end of the Cold War in 1991. America, so it seemed, was now the invincible superpower. Intoxicated by these two victories, the 21st century crashed into America.

This jubilation did not last long; on 11 Sept 2001, terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Beginning in October of 2001, the Global War on Terror commenced with the invasion of Afghanistan.[8] The war in Afghanistan was eerily similar to that of Vietnam. Yet, the U.S. had not learned its lessons fully and was unprepared for the pacifying mission in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban. The United States also failed to follow the warning of Clausewitz against opening a second front,  and started a second war in Iraq in 2003. The ensuing occupation of Iraq led to the creation of ISIS and other terrorist organizations, and in Afghanistan, the government made no headway into the rural areas. In the fallout of the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, it looks like the Army is preparing to continue the mistake of failing to learn.

Losing Institutional Knowledge and Forcing a Path

In providing a quick breakdown of over a century of warfare, this paper has highlighted one of the biggest shortcomings of the U.S. Army. It fails, time and again, to fully develop and digest the lessons from previous conflicts beyond the tactical level of war.  In Vietnam, the Army failed to fully adapt to the war it was waging and continually tried to look for the war it wanted to fight. American combat commanders failed to embrace pacification in large numbers. In Vietnam, many tactical-level leaders found it impossible to engage and directly fight the North Vietnamese Army or South Vietnamese insurgents. While giving nothing more than lip service to winning the hearts-and-minds, the Army failed to win the American war in Vietnam.

In losing the war in Vietnam, the Army failed to learn from it. The Army never fully maintained any knowledge from the war, instead choosing to forget the loss. Due to this desire to distance itself from the failure in Vietnam, the Army failed to provide the generation that invaded and then occupied Iraq and Afghanistan with proper strategic understanding. Choosing to forget lessons learned from war, the Army failed to interact with, adapt to, and reassess strategy. Adapting strategy is vastly important to winning a war, and in the case of the Army, it fails to reassess the failures of the past.[9]

The ability to adapt and learn are key parts of strategic planning. Without the willingness to create a profound set of lessons learned at the strategic level, the Army is doomed to repeat its failures. In Colin Gray’s Fighting Talk, he discusses in Maxim 37 that American strategists fail to develop a fuller sense of history.[10] Instead, they live in the present, and while history is not the end all be all of predicting the next fight, it can help one understand the fight better. In On War, Clausewitz uses historical analysis, from the Second Persian War to the final battle of Napoleon at Waterloo, to illustrate his theoretical ideas.[11] This is not an argument that every Army general needs to be a classically trained historian; however, this argues that every Army officer should have a grasp of history.[12]

The reason for discussing history is that the Army fails to remember its unpleasant history. Choosing instead to move on quickly, pretending that the defeat was outside of their control. The Army fails to actively collect its history at the strategic level, instead blaming outside issues. In Vietnam, the media and politicians were blamed; in Afghanistan, just choose one of the four presidents who were in office during the conflict. While shifting to project strength into INDOPACOM makes sense, ignoring Iraq and Afghanistan to do so puts the Army at a disadvantage. 

Why did the Army actively ignore the lessons from Vietnam and fail to implement them in Afghanistan and Iraq? It can be pointed to the last conflicts discussed in the above section: the end of the Cold War and the success of Desert Storm. The victory disease of winning these two conflicts infected the Army. With the end of the Cold War, America saw itself as the only dominant force in the world. However, the Army rested on the presumption that the next conflict would be with a  near-peer in the late 1990s,  just to spend the next two decades fighting counterinsurgencies. In failing to fully develop the lessons from Vietnam, the Army failed to allow officers and planners to be better prepared. Having failed to properly create lessons learned, the Army led itself into another failure. It is again attempting to do this; in moving as quickly as it can in structure and memory from Afghanistan and Iraq, it is dooming younger officers and leaders to the same fate. Clausewitz says that each war does have something different about it, but that the theory of strategy and war has a general and universal element— and thus, studying the most current conflict without rushing to the next is important in developing strategy.[13]

This rush to fight the near-peer threat is symptomatic of the preferred American way to fight. Andrew Krepinevich’s The Army and Vietnam discusses the desire of the Army officers in Vietnam to fight large-scale battles, not the war in front of them. This obsession with fighting large-scale battles has continued in the American psyche today. The Army needs to give up on rushing to war and instead focus part of its institutional strength on remembering war, on facilitating a proper understanding of the strategic and policy history. The problem is that the Army fails to learn strategic lessons and only pays lip service to teaching strategy to its officers, instead choosing to focus on operational art. It fails to teach younger officers how to be strategic leaders.

Conclusion

On 30 Aug 2021, the last United States forces left the ground at the Kabul airport; the concurrent fall and total collapse of the Afghan government spelled the final blow to the American mission in Afghanistan. In scenes reminiscent of the fall of Saigon in 1975, America's military once again failed to achieve total pacification. A cycle of rushing to forget the implications of the defeat began—revisionist generals went on talk shows to proclaim that all they needed was more time, treasure, and blood. Instead of truly searching for the lessons in the loss of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, the Army has shifted the blame and rushed to look for a war it could win.

This spells a disaster for the Army and seems to be the only path known to today's leaders. It has been almost 50 years since the fall of Saigon, and the Army as an institution repeated the same mistakes in Afghanistan. They are poised to fail to learn and hope not to have to fight that type of war anymore. When I heard that explained at my Basic Officer Leader Course, I was lost; how could they know?

In exploring the last century or so of American military history, it is easy to see the pitfalls that the Army has hit. It managed to fail to remember Vietnam comprehensively, as America occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. In each case, the wars are separated by victories on the part of the United States. In each case, the Army suffered from victory disease and pushed the losses to the outside.

Not only does the Army need to better institutionalize learning from more current conflicts and not rush to its next war, but it also needs to revamp its education system to better prepare officers for this education. The current system fails to introduce young officers to strategic thought and theory, instead ignoring any talent and relegating them from learning. Demanding memorization of FM 3-0 does not make for better planners. As Clausewitz indicates, doctrine is more of a guide than a rule, and strict adherence to doctrine does not make one a military genius.[14] 

In the rush to shift towards INDOPACOM, the Army is failing to better itself. As can be seen in Russia's failure to achieve any strategic success in Ukraine, the definition of war is changing. Fighting is becoming more fluid and complex, even without the cyber realm. The Army would do better if it focused on learning while reconfiguring its force stance. Developing a better critical lesson from the past conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan while watching Russia's invasion of Ukraine might give the U.S. Army the edge it needs in the next fight.

This is bold and counters the prevailing winds in the Army, but as Clausewitz describes boldness in his military genius: “In other words, a distinguished commander without boldness is unthinkable. No man who is not bold can play such a role, and therefore we consider this quality the first prerequisite of the great military leaders.”[15] In changing the learning structure of the Army, one would be bold.

Kyle Rable is an officer in the U.S. Army and is currently a Ph.D. Student at Texas Tech University studying military history. He received his BA from the University of Toledo and his MA from Bowling Green State University. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of Texas Tech University, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Header Image: U.S. Marines conduct vehicle recovery drills, Camp Pendleton, California, 2021 (Joel Rivera-Camacho)

Notes:

[1] Russell Weigley, The American Way of Way: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973.) and Donald Stoked, Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and U.S. Strategy from the Korean War to the Present(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

[2] Fuller, A Military History of the Western World, Volume II,364-451.

[3] See: Elizabeth Same, Looking For The Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,2021).

[4] See: Samet, Looking For The Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness.

[5] William Stueck, Rethinking The Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History (Princeton: Princeton University Press,2002).

[6] Stueck, Rethinking The Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History, 185-206.

[7] See Greg Daddis No Sure Victory and Andrew Krepinevich The Army and Vietnam.

[8] Andrew Bacevich, America’s War For The Greater Middle East: A Military History (New York: Random House, 2017)227-228.

[9] George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2014),363-380. See also, Krepinevich The Army and Vietnam.

[10] Colin Gray, Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy (New York: Potomac Books, 2009) 151-154.

[11] Carl Von Clausewitz, Howard, Paret, Brodie On War,  867-870.

[12] Carl Von Clausewitz, Howard, Paret, Brodie On War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) 168-169.

[13] Carl Von Clausewitz, Howard, Paret, Brodie On War,  717-718.

[14] Carl Von Clausewitz, Howard, Paret, Brodie On War,  162-164.

[15] Carl Von Clausewitz, Howard, Paret, Brodie On War,223-227.