Learning the Lessons of Modern War

By Thomas G. Mahnken

Learning the Lessons of Modern War uses the study of the recent past to illuminate the future. More specifically, it examines the lessons of recent wars as a way of understanding continuity and change in the character and conduct of war.

The volume brings together contributions from a group of well-known scholars and practitioners from across the world to examine the conduct of recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, South America, and Asia. The book's first section consists of chapters that explore the value of a contemporary approach to history and reflect on the value of learning lessons from the past. Its second section focuses on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chapters on Iraq discuss the lessons of the Iraq War, the British perspective on the conflict, and the war as seen through the lens of Saddam Hussein's military. Chapters on Afghanistan discuss counterinsurgency operations during the war, Britain's experience in Afghanistan, raising and training Afghan forces, and U.S. interagency performance. The book's third section examines the lessons of wars involving Russia, Israel, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Georgia, and Colombia. It concludes by exploring overarching themes associated with the conduct of recent wars.

Containing a foreword by former National Security Advisor Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, Learning the Lessons of Modern War is an indispensable resource for international relations and security studies scholars, policymakers, and military professionals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jun 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781503612518

Book preview

LEARNING THE LESSONS OF MODERN WAR

Edited by

Thomas G. Mahnken

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

© 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

An Iraqi Perspective on the Invasion of 2003 is © 2020 by the Institute of Defense Analysis.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mahnken, Thomas G., 1965– editor.

Title: Learning the lessons of modern war / edited by Thomas G. Mahnken.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020004559 (print) | LCCN 2020004560 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503612266 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503612501 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503612518 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Military art and science—History—21st century. | Military history, Modern—21st century. | Afghan War, 2001- | Iraq War, 2003–2011.

Classification: LCC U42.5 .L43 2020 (print) | LCC U42.5 (ebook) | DDC 355/.02—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004559

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004560

Cover design: Kevin Barrett Kane

Cover photograph: Xenia800

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Foreword

Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, U.S. Army (Retired)

Introduction

Thomas G. Mahnken

PART I: Learning Lessons from History

1. Learning Lessons: The Value of a Contemporary Approach to History

Michael Evans

2. Thoughts on Lessons Learned in the Past

Williamson Murray

PART II: Iraq and Afghanistan

3. Lessons of the Iraq War

Peter R. Mansoor

4. Operation Iraqi Freedom: Key Lessons from the British Experience

Ben Barry

5. An Iraqi Military Perspective on the Invasion of 2003

Kevin M. Woods

6. Afghanistan and the Crisis of Counterinsurgency, 2001–2014

Carter Malkasian

7. Britain’s War in Afghanistan, 2001–2014

Theo Farrell

8. Raising and Mentoring Security Forces in Afghanistan

T. X. Hammes

9. The Accidental Counterinsurgents: U.S. Performance in Afghanistan

Todd Greentree

PART III: Lessons of Other Wars

10. Lessons of Modern War: A Case Study of the Sri Lankan War

Ahmed S. Hashim

11. Operation Enduring Freedom—Philippines: Lessons Learned from a Special Warfare Approach to Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency

David S. Maxwell

12. Lessons from the War in Georgia

Svante E. Cornell

13. Russian Military Doctrine and Exercises

Phillip A. Petersen

14. Operation Cast Lead: From Light Duty to Heavy Duty

Scott C. Farquhar

15. An Incomplete Success: Security Assistance in Colombia

Douglas Porch

Conclusion

Thomas G. Mahnken

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book grew out of a project sponsored and inspired by H. R. McMaster, who was then serving as the commanding general of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, which was meant to help the U.S. Army learn the lessons of contemporary wars. The project culminated a workshop organized by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in October 2015 under the leadership of Greg Melcher, Chris Bishop, Joe Buche, John Nolen, Nolan Sherrill, and the wonderful staff of APL. I would like to thank all who participated in the conference, including not only the authors of the chapters that appear in this book, but also those who contributed to the workshop through candid discussion and debate, including Major General Bernard Barrera, Eliot A. Cohen, Joseph J. Collins, Colonel E. J. Degen, Lieutenant General Jim Dubik, Michael Eisenstadt, Jeffrey Friedman, Michael Hartmayer, Frank Hoffman, David E. Johnson, Rob Johnson, Phillip Karber, Tom Keaney, Hale Laughlin, Robert Leonhard, Paul Lubeck, Thomas Lynch, David Maxwell, Anit Mukherjee, Lieutenant General Sir Paul Newton, Colonel Joel Rayburn, Nadia Schadlow, Doug Winton, and Lieutenant Colonel Matt Zais.

The journey from workshop to edited volume was a long one that would have ended in failure were it not for the assistance of Leah Pennywark of Stanford University Press and the hard work of my talented research assistant, Connor Barniskis.

Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank H. R. McMaster, ever the soldier-scholar, for bringing this project into being and seeing it through to the end.

CONTRIBUTORS

Ben Barry is Senior Fellow for Land Warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). Ben comments and writes on the higher management of defense, military strategy, operations and tactics, military innovation and adaptation, modern warfare, and land warfare, in particular. Ben joined the IISS in 2010, before which he served in the British Army. As well as training in Germany, France, Cyprus, Canada, Portugal, and New Zealand, and operational service in Hong Kong and Northern Ireland, he commanded both an armored infantry battalion and a multinational brigade on UN and NATO operations in Bosnia. He was Director of the British Army Staff in the U.K. Ministry of Defence and author of the Army’s lessons-learned analysis of post-conflict stabilization of Iraq. He is the author of Harsh Lessons: Iraq, Afghanistan and the Changing Character of War (IISS, 2017) and The Road from Sarajevo: British Army Operations in Bosnia, 1995–1996 (The History Press, 2016).

Svante E. Cornell is a Swedish scholar specializing in politics and security issues in Eurasia, especially the South Caucasus, Turkey, and Central Asia. He is a director and co-founder of the Stockholm-based Institute for Security and Development Policy, and Research Director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program (CACI), and joined the American Foreign Policy Council as a Senior Fellow for Eurasia in January 2017.

Michael Evans is the General Sir Francis Hassett Chair of Military Studies at the Australian Defence College and a professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University. Previously, he was head of the Australian Army’s Land Warfare Studies Centre at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, and served in Land Headquarters and the Directorate of Army Research and Analysis. He has held numerous visiting fellowships, including a Sir Alfred Beit Fellowship in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.

Scott C. Farquhar is an army civilian at the Mission Command Center of Excellence. A retired infantry officer, he served tours overseas in Germany, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the former Yugoslavia as well as exercises in Egypt, Japan, and Israel. Mr. Farquhar is a former instructor at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College and military historian at the Combat Studies Institute. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Providence College and a master’s degree from Kansas State University in history. Writings include Back to Basics: A Study of the Second Lebanon War and Operation CAST LEAD (editor); several chapters in A Different Kind of War: The US Army in Operation Enduring Freedom, October 2001—September 2005, the U.S. Army’s first study of its campaign in Afghanistan; the monograph Legacy of Langres; and numerous studies, articles, and papers for CALL, the United States Institute for Peace, and the Society for Military History.

Theo Farrell is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He was previously a professor and head of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He is a fellow of the U.K. Academy of Social Sciences, and Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institution. Professor Farrell served on a number of strategic and campaign reviews for U.S. and British commanders in Afghanistan. His most recent book, Unwinnable: Britain’s War in Afghanistan, 2001–2014 (Vintage, 2018) was named Book of the Year by the Sunday Times and the Evening Standard.

Todd Greentree is a research associate with the Changing Character of War Centre at Oxford University and teaches National Security at the University of New Mexico. A former U.S. Foreign Service Officer, his political-military experience in five wars began in El Salvador during the early 1980s. Between 2008 and 2012, Dr. Greentree served in Afghanistan with Task Force Warrior in Regional Command—East, with 5/2 Stryker Brigade in Kandahar Province, and as director of the Strategic Initiatives Group with the 10th Mountain Division in Regional Command—South. He taught Strategy and Policy at the Naval War College and was a visiting scholar in the Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS. He is currently writing The Blood of Others, a book about the wars at the end of the Cold War in Angola, Central America, and Afghanistan and what they have to do with us today.

T. X. Hammes is a distinguished research fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University. In his thirty years in the Marine Corps, T. X. Hammes served at all levels in the operating forces, including commanding an intelligence battalion, an infantry battalion, and the Chemical Biological Incident Response Force. He participated in stabilization operations in Somalia and Iraq as well as training of insurgents in various places. Hammes has a master’s degree in historical research and a doctorate in modern history from Oxford University. He is the author of two books, seventeen book chapters, and over 150 articles. He lectures extensively on the future of conflict, strategy, and insurgency in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

Ahmed S. Hashim is an associate professor of strategic studies in the Military Studies Program at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research focus extends from Southwest Asia to Southeast Asia. Among his latest publications is The Caliphate at War: Operational Realities and Innovations of the Islamic State (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Thomas G. Mahnken is president and chief executive officer of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a senior research professor at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at The Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning from 2006–2009. He also served as a member of the congressionally mandated National Defense Strategy Commission and on the staff of the 2014 National Defense Panel, the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel, and the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. He is the author of The Gathering Pacific Storm: Emerging U.S.-China Strategic Competition in Defense Technological and Industrial Development (Cambria University Press, 2018); Arms Races in International Politics from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Oxford University Press, 2016); Strategy in Asia: The Past, Present and Future of Regional Security (Stanford University Press, 2014); Competitive Strategies for the 21st Century: Theory, History, and Practice (Stanford University Press, 2012); Technology and the American Way of War Since 1945 (Columbia University Press, 2008); and Uncovering Ways of War: U.S. Intelligence and Foreign Military Innovation, 1918–1941 (Cornell University Press, 2002); among other works. He is a recipient of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service and the Department of the Navy Superior Civilian Service Medal.

Carter Malkasian is the author of War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of War in the Afghan Frontier (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Islamic State (Oxford University Press, 2017). From 2015 to 2019 he was the senior advisor for strategy to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford. He has extensive experience working in conflict zones. The highlight was nearly two years in Garmser district, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, as a State Department political officer. Before that, Dr. Malkasian deployed twice to Iraq as a civilian advisor from the Center for Naval Analyses to Iraq, mostly in Al Anbar in 2004 and 2006. Other field assignments have been to Honduras, Kuwait (OIF-1), Kunar (2007–2008), and Kabul as the political advisor to General Dunford (2013–2014). Other publications include A History of Modern Wars of Attrition (2002); The Korean War, 1950–1953 (2001); and War Downsized: How to Accomplish More with Less, in Foreign Affairs (2012). Dr. Malkasian completed his doctorate in history at Oxford University. He speaks Pashto.

Peter R. Mansoor, Colonel, U.S. Army (Ret.), is the General Raymond E. Mason Jr. Chair of Military History at The Ohio State University. A 1982 distinguished graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, he earned his doctorate from The Ohio State University. He assumed his academic position in September 2008 after a twenty-six-year military career that included two combat tours and which culminated in his service as the executive officer to General David Petraeus, Commanding General of Multi-National Force-Iraq. He is the author of The GI Offensive in Europe: The Triumph of American Infantry Divisions, 1941–1945; Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander’s War in Iraq; and Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War, and has coedited (with Williamson Murray) Hybrid Warfare: Fighting Complex Opponents from the Ancient World to the Present and Grand Strategy and Military Alliances.

David S. Maxwell, Colonel, U.S. Army Special Forces (Ret.), is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He is a thirty-year veteran, retired in 2011 with his final assignment teaching national security strategy at the National War College. He is a graduate of Miami University and holds an MMAS degree from CGSC and SAMS and an MS degree in National Security from the National War College. He served on the ROK/U.S. Combined Forces Command staff, where he was coauthor of the original ROK JCS—UNC/CFC CONPLAN 5029–99. He commanded 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group in Okinawa, including the first deployment to Mindanao for OEF-P in 2001–2002. He commanded the Joint Special Operations Task Force—Philippines in 2006–2007. He is on the board of advisors for Spirit of America and is a member of the board of directors for the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK), the Small Wars Journal, and the OSS Society.

Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, U.S. Army (Retired), is the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institution, and a lecturer at Stanford University School of Business. He chairs the Center for Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy. He was the twenty-sixth Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. McMaster served as an active duty Army officer for thirty-four years after graduation from the United States Military Academy. He holds a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Williamson Murray is professor emeritus at The Ohio State University. He is the author of numerous books, the most recent of which is America and the Future of War.

Phillip A. Petersen has a 1985 PhD in political science from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (dissertation title—Images as Defense Policy Determinants in the Soviet-American Military Relationship Since 1945), a 1974 master’s degree in political science from Western Michigan University (thesis title—Systemic Adaptation: Can the Soviet System Accommodate the Democratic Movement?), and a 1969 bachelor of science degree in education from Central Michigan University. For fifteen years he served as a United States Army officer, an intelligence analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, and a policy analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and at the National Defense University. Upon leaving government service with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Dr. Petersen joined The Potomac Foundation as a senior fellow. From December 2015 until December 2017 he served as Potomac’s Vice President for Studies, until becoming president of the Centre for the Study of New Generation Warfare.

Douglas Porch is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and former chair of the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. A PhD from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University, his books include The French Secret Services: From the Dreyfus Affair to Desert Storm (1995); The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force (1991), which won prizes both in the United States and in France; The Conquest of the Sahara; The Conquest of Morocco; The March to the Marne: The French Army 1871–1914; The Portuguese Armed Forces and the Revolution; and Army and Revolution: France 1815–1844. Wars of Empire, part of the Cassell History of Warfare series, appeared in October 2000 and in paperback in 2001. The Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theater in World War II, a selection of the Military History Book Club, the History Book Club, and the Book of the Month Club, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Macmillan in the United Kingdom in May 2004 as Hitler’s Mediterranean Gamble. It received the Award for Excellence in U.S. Army Historical Writing from The Army Historical Foundation. His latest book, Counterinsurgency: The Origins, Development and Myths of the New Way of War, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013 and has been placed on the Army Chief of Staff’s reading list for all officers. He spent 2014–2015 as Academic Visitor at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and Visiting Fellow at Oxford University’s Changing Character of War Programme. At present, he is researching a book on French combatants in World War II.

Kevin M. Woods is a defense analyst and historian, and deputy director of the Joint Advanced Warfighting Division at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA). Prior to joining IDA, Dr. Woods was a U.S. Army aviator and served for more than twenty-one years in a variety of global assignments. He has a PhD in history from the University of Leeds. Dr. Woods is the lead author of several books on the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. As a senior analyst, Dr. Woods has also led numerous multidisciplinary research projects, ranging from historical lessons-learned studies, joint concept development, military experimentation, operational analyses of recent conflicts, and Red Team studies for the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Intelligence Community.

FOREWORD

Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, U.S. Army (Retired)

Professor Don Higginbotham, an extraordinary historian and fine man, said upon my completion of the written exam in history at the University of North Carolina, Congratulations, you now know more history than you will ever know. While historical knowledge is useful, the most important benefit to studying history is learning how to think. How to ask the right questions. How to trace events back to their causes. How to appreciate the complex causality of events. How to do as nineteenth century philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz suggested—break what seems fused into its constituent elements. And how to understand historical events and circumstances on their own terms, without the burdensome imposition of theory. If there is one lesson of history on which all historians might agree, it is to avoid simplistic analogies or unsophisticated, linear thinking about complex problems. The historians’ tendency to qualify the application of historical lessons is consistent with Sir Michael Howard’s observation that we ought not to study history to make us cleverer for the next time, but instead to help make us wise forever. In 2014, Tom Mahnken and I initiated this study to help inform the design, doctrine, training, and education of the future U.S. Army. The idea was to convene some of the very best military historians to deepen our understanding of recent and ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to place the American experience of those conflicts in context of other wars. The result exceeded our expectations. In the intervening years the essays have stood the test of time. We are happy to share them.

The reader might view these excellent essays as a way to mature his or her own theory or understanding of war and warfare. The scope of the essays is consistent with the approach to the study of military history that Sir Michael Howard suggested in his seminal 1961 essay. First, to study in width; to observe how warfare has developed over a long period. Next to study in depth; to study campaigns thoroughly with an eye toward understanding the complex causality of events as well as the human and psychological dimensions of war. And last, to study in context; to understand wars and warfare in light of their social, cultural, economic, moral, and political dynamics, because as Sir Michael observed, the roots of victory and defeat often have to be sought far from the battlefield.

The contributors to this volume are humble; their efforts to connect historical knowledge and understanding to contemporary strategic and operational problems are rational and nuanced. A common theme is how recent difficulties that the United States encountered in strategic decision-making, operational planning, and future force development have stemmed, at least in part, from the neglect or obvious misuse of history. It is not too ambitious to suggest that this volume might serve, in part, as a corrective to flawed thinking about war. The essays expose a tendency to neglect continuities in war and warfare.

During the decade prior to the mass murder attacks against the United States in September 2001, thinking about emerging threats to national security explicitly rejected continuity in favor of change. Instead of making a grounded projection into the future, thinking about defense was driven by a fantastical theory about the character of future conflict. Proponents of what became known as defense transformation argued that a revolution in military affairs based on advances in surveillance, communications, information, and precision strike technologies would deliver dominant battlespace knowledge and permit U.S. forces to achieve full spectrum dominance against any opponent in future war.

The language was hubristic. Concepts with names like network centric warfare, rapid decisive operations, shock and awe, and full spectrum dominance embraced what increasingly appeared as a faith-based argument that future war would lie mainly in the realm of certainty and therefore could be won quickly and efficiently at low cost, by small forces. Indeed, many believed that leap ahead technological capabilities would even prevent conflict because adversaries would not have the temerity to challenge the United States. Ultimately, this self-delusion about the character of future conflict undermined U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq as war plans and decisions based on flawed visions of war confronted reality.

The authors demonstrate the value of contemporary history in informing policy and strategy. As the historian Carl Becker observed in his annual address to the American Historical Association in December 1931, memory of past and anticipation of future events work together, go hand in hand in a friendly way, without disputing over priority and leadership. In recent years, however, those anticipating future events were dismissive of the memory of the past. It is up to readers to draw their own lessons from these essays and help ensure that history does not, as Becker warned, lie inert in unread books as flawed, ahistorical memories of the past or visions of the future go unchallenged. In wartime, the neglect or superficial understanding of history can be dangerous, dangerous to the national interest and dangerous to those who bear the brunt of the fighting.

INTRODUCTION

Thomas G. Mahnken

This book uses the study of the recent past to illuminate the future. More specifically, it examines the lessons of recent wars as a way of understanding continuity and change in the character and conduct of war.

Because the test of arms is the only true test of a military’s effectiveness, and because wars are both occasional and unique, knowledge of military affairs must combine theory and practice. Imagine a surgeon who studies his profession diligently by reading the most up-to-date medical journals, observing others in the operating room, and practicing using the latest training aids, but only enters the operating room a couple of times during his career, if at all. Imagine also that that surgeon learned from professors and interned under surgeons who had themselves studied and performed only a few procedures. And imagine that each surgical procedure is different, on a different patient, and under unique circumstances. That, metaphorically, is the military profession, and that metaphor highlights the critical importance of theory and history for the military profession. It is thus fitting that this book’s authors are a group of scholar-practitioners from across the globe.

The first section of the book discusses the importance and the challenges of learning lessons from military history.¹ In the chapter that opens the section, Michael Evans makes a powerful case for a contemporary and interdisciplinary approach to history, one that is fully engaged with considerations of the profession of arms, to help soldiers and scholars navigate through the fog of peace to apprehend the future of warfare. In the chapter that follows, Williamson Murray examines attempts by military organizations to learn lessons from history over the past two centuries. His survey reveals a decidedly mixed record, a tangible reminder of the challenges that await those who seek to learn from history and of the importance of cultivating history-mindedness in the profession of arms.

The second section of the book explores the lessons of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, two protracted irregular wars that have shaped a generation of American, allied, and coalition soldiers individually and collectively.² We are as human beings both informed and burdened by our personal experiences. If history is a guide, the lessons the military leaders of today and tomorrow have learned (or mis-learned, ignored, or forgotten) from these conflicts cannot help but shape decisions they will make for decades to come. In the section’s first two chapters, Peter Mansoor discusses the lessons of the Iraq War and Brigadier (Retired) Ben Barry offers a British perspective on the war. In the chapter that follows, Kevin Woods draws upon the treasure trove of Iraqi archival materials seized by coalition forces in 2003 to provide an Iraqi military perspective on the invasion of Iraq as a reminder of just how much an adversary’s perceptions can differ from our own. Woods’s chapter also provides a useful reminder that any account of a war that does not adequately give voice to the adversary’s perspective is incomplete and likely misleading.

This book’s chapters on Afghanistan, written in 2015, illustrate the challenges of learning from an ongoing war. Carter Malkasian discusses the challenges that coalition forces faced as they sought to formulate and implement a counterinsurgency strategy, whereas Theo Farrell provides an evaluation of Britain’s performance in the war through 2014. T. X. Hammes focuses on the importance of building the capacity of local forces for security in Afghanistan. More specifically, he focuses on the challenge of raising and mentoring Afghan security forces. Finally, Todd Greentree’s chapter provides an assessment of the overall U.S. government performance in Afghanistan.

The book’s final section examines the lessons of other recent wars from across the globe. Ahmed Hashim discusses the course and outcome of the Sri Lankan civil war, which featured an insurgency, and an approach to counterinsurgency, that differed greatly from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Similarly, David Maxwell’s chapter on Operation Enduring Freedom—Philippines reveals a very different approach to counterterrorism and counterinsurgency from that employed in Iraq and Afghanistan, one based upon a light U.S. presence and dedication to building the capacity of capabilities of local security organizations.

Nor have all recent wars been solely or mostly irregular in character. Russia’s war in Georgia is the subject of Svante Cornell’s chapter, whereas Philip A. Petersen views Russian views of contemporary war through the lens of Russian military doctrine and exercises. The character and conduct of recent wars in the Middle East has been different still. Scott Farquhar examines the lessons the Israel Defense Force derived from the Second Lebanon War in his chapter in this section. Douglas Porch examines one of the most successful contemporary counterinsurgency campaigns, the Colombian government’s war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC). Among other things, Porch’s essay demonstrates the importance of having capable local security institutions for implementing a counterinsurgency strategy.

Notes

1. See, for example, William C. Fuller Jr., What Is a Military Lesson? in Strategic Studies: A Reader, ed. Thomas G. Mahnken and Joseph A. Maiolo, 22–39 (New York: Routledge, 2014).

2. See also the U.S. Army’s excellent histories of the Iraq War. Colonel Joel D. Rayburn and Colonel Frank K. Sobchak, eds., The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, vol. 1, Invasion—Insurgency—Civil War, 2003–2006 (Carlisle, PA: Army War College Press, 2019); Rayburn and Sobchack, eds., The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, vol. 2, Surge and Withdrawal, 2007–2011 (Carlisle, PA: Army War College Press, 2019).

Part 1

LEARNING LESSONS FROM HISTORY

Chapter 1

LEARNING LESSONS

THE VALUE OF A CONTEMPORARY APPROACH TO HISTORY

Michael Evans

History is not a cookbook which gives recipes; it teaches by analogy and forces us to decide what, if anything, is analogous. History gives us a feel for the significance of events, but it does not teach which individual events are significant. . . . Certain principles can be developed, certain understandings can be elaborated, but it is impossible to predict in advance how they apply in concrete situations.

—Henry A. Kissinger¹

If war is too important to be left to generals, then it is surely the case that history is too important to be left to historians. As a discipline directly concerned with the processes of change, history cannot be quarantined from contemporary matters nor can it be prevented from informing speculation about the future. In the West, while most academic historians are interested in the study of history per se, those occupied with government policymaking and military affairs are drawn to focus on the uses of history to glean lessons of value from the past to inform their actions in the present and the future.

When it comes to history, there is often a gulf of mutual incomprehension and a lack of sympathy between academic purists and applied practitioners. They represent two distinct approaches to historical knowledge, in effect two camps which, in many ways, seem to resemble a variant of C. P. Snow’s two cultures.² In 1959, the English scientist and novelist wrote of an intellectual polarization in Western society between a humanities culture of natural Luddites tied to the purity of the past and a scientific culture whose advocates have the future in their bones. Snow believed that the consequence of a growing division between the contemplative and the active strands in Western civilization would be damaging to the social fabric. Such a state of affairs, he suggested, would lead to a loss of consensus about both the processes of change and the character of progress.³ Today, in an era of corrosive postmodern influences and rapid technological change, the concerns Snow raised over half a century ago can easily be applied to the lack of consensus that now exists over the meaning and purpose of the discipline of history as well as the very notion of historical-consciousness.

This chapter examines the role that historical lessons play in thinking about the conduct of warfare. Three areas are examined. First, in order to establish context, the debate over the use of history for lessons learned is sketched with the aim of highlighting the differences between the applied and pure schools of thought that exist on the subject. Second, the chapter argues that the most effective way to use history in the study of war is to develop a contemporary approach to the subject. Such an approach emphasizes the use of historically sophisticated war studies but seeks to employ these for diagnostic purposes in an interdisciplinary framework of analysis. Third, and finally, it is argued that, in the profession of arms, the use of history tends to flourish when historians embrace an interdisciplinary perspective and when they concern themselves with examining the interconnections between the past, the present, and—most especially—the future of war.

The Debate Over the Lessons of History

A historical lesson may be defined as an effort to establish useful knowledge by study, experience, or teaching of the past with the aim of improving the future conduct of human affairs. The belief that history yields enduring lessons for an unchanging human condition is an old subject and has been particularly influential in statecraft and the practice of war. Thucydides wrote his History of the Peloponnesian War as a manual of instruction for those who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.⁴

Thucydides’ vision of war as a recurring combination of human agency and contingent events undertaken by actors, at once conscious of their acts yet unconscious of their destiny, has echoed across the centuries in Western political thought.⁵ In the early twenty-first century, the speedy rise of China and its strategic implications for the United States has created a veritable cottage industry of forecasting that draws on Thucydides’ account of the struggle between Sparta and Athens. The political scientist Graham T. Allison has gone so far as to write of the existence of a Thucydides trap that represents a timeless historical lesson on how inter-state war occurs. As he puts it,

If we were betting [about conflict between China and the United States] on the basis of history, the answer to the question about Thucydides’ trap appears obvious. In 11 of 15 cases since 1500 where a rising power emerged to challenge a ruling power, war occurred. Think about Germany after unification as it overtook Britain as Europe’s largest economy. In 1914 and in 1939, its aggression and the UK’s [United Kingdom’s] response produced world wars.⁶

The Thucydides trap, along with appeasement at Munich in 1938, has assumed the status of master analogy for policymakers who look to history for what have been defined as predictive, prescriptive, and existential reasons of statecraft.⁷ Similarly, in the profession of arms, the use of historical experience as magistra vitae—a field to be ploughed to yield lessons in preparing for future armed conflict—has a long pedigree. Napoleon set the tone when he declared that the secrets of military success for the future lay in the past and could be learned by studying the Great Captains from Alexander the Great to Frederick of Prussia.⁸ An applicatory approach to history received further justification in 1935 when General Douglas MacArthur, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, wrote,

More than most professions, the military is forced to depend on intelligent interpretation of the past for signposts charting the future. Devoid of opportunity, in peace, for self instruction through actual practice of his profession, the soldier makes maximum use of the historical record in assuring the readiness of himself and his command to function efficiently in an emergency.⁹

Not surprisingly, military practitioners have often been, and remain, impatient with notions of academic purism. To possess value, manuscripts must serve the ends of muddy boots, and many members of the profession of arms would share Iago’s view of the theoretical soldier, Cassio, in Shakespeare’s Othello: Forsooth, a great arithmetician . . . that never set a squadron in the field, nor a division in battle . . . Bookish rhetoric [and] mere prattle without practice is all his soldiership.¹⁰ So it was that in 1943 when George S. Patton Jr., studied the eleventh-century campaigns of William the Conqueror in Normandy, he did so not as a disinterested scholar but as a professional soldier preparing himself for the future Allied campaign in Western Europe.¹¹ A belief in practical military history—for the purposes of gaining a better understanding of current problems and future challenges—has never been confined to practitioners but is shared by many theorists. For example, both Basil Liddell Hart and J. F. C. Fuller endorsed the applied value of history in studying war. One of Liddell Hart’s books was titled Why Don’t We Learn from History?—and throughout his long career, he believed that analysis of past wars needed to be as rigorously scientific as possible. In this endeavor, he wrote, "the practical value of history is