David Martin Dispatch: Why Learning The Lessons Of Vietnam Can Be Hard 30 Years Later

Pentagon correspondent David Martin expounds on his interview with an author of a new military doctrine on dealing with the insurgency in Iraq. Martin has provided PE with an extended version of his interview with Lt. Col. John Nagl who explains why the U.S. military is changing its approach to war. Click on the picture to play (2:58 long).

A story I did this week about a new counter insurgency doctrine for fighting the war in Iraq made passing reference to the fact that it is long overdue. Why it’s overdue is an interesting story in itself. Lt. Col. John Nagl, one of the authors of the new doctrine, blames it on the U.S. Army’s failure to learn the lessons of the last counter insurgency war it fought – Vietnam. Instead of trying to figure out where it went wrong in Vietnam, Nagl says, the Army just blamed it on other people – Lyndon Johnson for forcing it to fight with one hand tied behind its back, the press for undermining public support for the war, etc. In other words, the Army did not try to figure out how it could fight a guerrilla war better the next time – it just vowed there never would be a next time. But 30 plus years later it finds itself mired in another guerrilla war.

According to Nagl, who has written a book entitled “Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife,” which is in part a study of Army tactics in Vietnam, the primary lesson that should have been learned is that you can’t use conventional tactics to defeat an unconventional enemy. Overwhelming fire power can defeat a conventional enemy, and nobody does that better than the U.S. military – but you could have said the same thing back in the 1960s. Nagl – and the new counter insurgency doctrine he wrote – maintains that it takes underwhelming fire power to defeat an unconventional enemy – or, as the doctrine puts it, “the more force you use, the less effective you are.” You can imagine what a culture shock that must be for the Army.

Large institutions – and especially large military institutions – don’t handle culture shock well. It’s easy enough to start teaching the new counter insurgency doctrine at places like West Point and the Command and General Staff College, but it’s an entirely different matter to inculcate that doctrine into the Army’s collective mindset. It’s the difference between studying a foreign language in school and actually learning to speak it by living in the country. It took more than a decade for the Army to transform itself from the basket case of a military service that emerged from Vietnam into the juggernaut of the first Gulf War. I don’t think it will take that long to transform that shock and awe juggernaut into a counter insurgency force because this time there’s a war on and that gives everything a greater urgency. But it’s hard to undo a generation’s worth of training, and it’s going to be messy – which is why Nagl titled his book “Eating Soup with a Knife.”