Winning Battles, Losing Wars

GENERALS PREPARE TO FIGHT THE LAST WAR, the saying goes, especially if that war was a victory. The proverbial case study on this is the way the military trained and structured itself after World War II, with an emphasis on Europe, big weapons systems, and mass mobilization. Instead, the army founded itself in the strange and confusing war in Vietnam starting in the late 1950s and lasting until the early 1970s. If the proverb was true, the United States would have learned its counterinsurgency lessons from Vietnam and applied them effectively in Afghanistan and Iraq.