The record of learning from the past is a mixed bag in any profession, and perhaps more so in the military. Generals are often accused of fighting the last war, or of fighting wars based on a false premise about this or that alleged revolution in military affairs. I’d like to offer another perspective.

As the great British military historian, Sir Michael Howard, once said, “I am tempted to declare that whatever doctrine the Armed Forces are working on now, they have got it wrong. I am also tempted to declare that it does not matter that they have got it wrong. What does matter is their capacity to get it right quickly once the moment arrives. It is this flexibility both in the minds of the Armed Forces and in their organization, that above all needs to be developed in peacetime.”

Predicting the nature of fighting or the nature of a future war is very hard, if not impossible. Even the vaunted German Army of 1939 and 1940 found itself unable to win against Russia and the UK in 1941 and 1942 employing the same operational strategy, equipment and well trained Army that succeeded so brilliantly in Poland, France and elsewhere.

As we write in the book, pre-war assumptions about the likely nature of Iraq after Saddam proved to be way off the mark. Thus, pre-war assumptions about how to plan for and what means to employ in the post-invasion phase of the campaign were implemented at precisely the time that a new reality was making itself known on the ground. That new reality included massive looting and destruction of Iraq’s decrepit physical infrastructure, collapse of all civil administration, a collapse of law and order, economic collapse, massive political friction, and violent resistance to the US and its allies by a complex set of enemies. By July 2003, it was clear that the April-June decisions had to be massively changed.

Whether the US Army, to use Howard’s phrase above, “got it right” quickly enough after the summer of 2003, would seem to me to be the most interesting historical verdict. One that I believe it is too soon to render.

I would also like to see some of this analysis acknowledge that even a “large footprint” strategy would have had significant downsides, many of them very serious and unpredictable, rather than just assuming that avoiding the difficulties that did occur would have meant smooth and successful transition.

Furthermore, while it is the civilian leadership’s prerogative to disregard the advice of the senior military leadership (such as Gen. Zinni, or in the case of the Army, Gen. Shinseki), they do so at their peril. As has been borne out in Iraq, you need a lot more troops to do the post-conflict security & constabulary work than you do for the “regime change.”

Throughout its history, the US Army has had to do the “small wars” work quite a bit, but because it’s messy and complicated, we, as an institution, chose to expend our resources for training and equipment on the “near-peer competitor” fight, even though recent post-1989 experience showed us that that wasn’t the direction we should have been going.

I sincerely hope that this war will be the watershed event that causes the Army to retain significant force structure geared for this type of conflict, but with our institutional history as a guide, I doubt that we will. The next time this sort of thing pops up, the Army will unnecessarily re-invent the wheel.

I hope that you and your readers will be able to find much food for thought in the book. The initial coverage of the book in most blogs and media accounts is fixated on our analysis of the command structure changes in the summer of 2003. There is much more to the book, specifically the remarkable transitions that took place across the Army in nearly every war- fighting function to deal with the reality of post-Saddam Iraq. The reversal of intelligence operations, the development of new combat tactics, the building of Iraqi security forces are just three of the many examples. I look forward to seeing what others have to say, and answering questions. I hope the book’s readers see this historical book in the context of the Army’s attempts to learn from its past to prepare for the future.