ARTICLE

September 2004

Army Criticized for Not Learning From Past Wars

by Roxana Tiron

The U.S. Army must do a better job applying lessons from one conflict to another, said a senior military strategist. Events in Iraq, particularly, prove that the Army needs to reform its educational institutions to teach officers analytical skills and cultural awareness, said retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, a former commandant of the Army’s War College, in testimony to the House Armed Services Committee.

“We do a wonderful job collecting the data,” he said. “No one does that better than us.” Teams go out to collect and absorb information, talk to the soldiers in the field about their experiences and hold seminars about their findings. However, that is not enough, said Scales. The Army must be able to take that data and compare it against lessons from previous conflicts. These “intellectual leaps” require a more thorough analytical effort than simply chronicling exploits from the battlefield.

The U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, for example, could have provided useful—although limited—lessons for urban operations in Iraq, according to Scales, despite the different natures of the two conflicts.

“The most successful urban takedown, probably in the history of the U.S., was the invasion of Panama,” he said, noting that many of the “things that went wrong in Baghdad, went right in Panama. I realize it is a much different scale.”

In Panama, the United States executed a quick transition to civilian authorities after the removal from power of president Manuel Noriega, said Scales. “I think it was done brilliantly.”

In Iraq, conversely, the Defense Department failed to plan adequately for the transition after taking down the Saddam Hussein regime, Scales said.

Although experts agree that the Army should not be blamed for the Bush administration’s miscalculations in planning the war, others, such as Scales, believe that the Army must take responsibility for not adapting its training and education programs.

Responding to congressional criticism at a separate hearing, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker said that he fundamentally disagreed with Scales’ views.

The Army has made dramatic improvements in the last year and a half in the way it passes on lessons to its soldiers and trains them for operations, said Schoomaker. Proof of that is the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., which has modified its exercises to make them more realistic, Schoomaker said.

“We can do it better,” he admitted. “[But] no matter how well we do, there is always somebody who will want to do it better. That is good tension to have.” However, there is no way to make the process failsafe, he said. “Warfare is a human endeavor, and we will never ensure ourselves against human failings and misunderstandings.”

Many mistakes, in Scales’ opinion, can be avoided through a more thorough study of the history of warfare. And that requires mending the educational institutions. The military education system, he said, “is caught in friction and service specific issues.”

Schoomaker concurred that the U.S. Army has to transform “how we train and educate, and how we think.”

Scales argued that the process should start at the top.

“Every leader must be given the opportunity to study war. Learning must be a life-long process,” Scales said. “Every soldier should be given continuous access to the best and most inclusive programs of war studies.”

Soldiers are often too busy to learn in an Army that is stretched thin, he said. In 1976, the Army sent 7,400 officers to fully funded graduate school. Today, the Army sends 396, half of them going to the West Point Academy and the other half preparing for acquisition corps assignments, according to Scales.

Too much emphasis is placed on technology rather than human development, said Scales. Many of the perceived failures in Iraq are rooted in cultural ignorance, which in turn leads to poor personal connections with the people U.S. troops are trying to help. The lack of communication with a local population ultimately leads to inadequate intelligence.

“More than a year after the Iraqi war began, we have senior leaders returning home, and there seems to be a consensus among them that this conflict was fought brilliantly at the technological level, but inadequately at the human level,” said Scales. “The human element seems to underline virtually all of the functional shortcomings found in reports and media.”

There were shortcomings in information operations, civil affairs, civic action, cultural awareness and intelligence, said Scales. The United States has “great technical intelligence,” but for the wrong enemy, he said.

“Success in this phase [stability operations] rests in the ability of leaders to think and adapt faster than the enemy, and [in the ability of] soldiers to thrive in an environment of uncertainty, ambiguity and unfamiliarity,” he explained.

The military has to develop an exceptional ability to understand people, their culture and their motivations, he added.

Therefore, tactical intelligence operations need to be transformed from technology-centered to human-centered efforts, Scales asserted.

“When the kinetic phase of the war ended, soldiers and Marines found themselves immersed in an alien culture unable to differentiate friend from foe,” he said. “The military possesses the technological means to conduct net-centric warfare, but it lacks the intellectual acumen to conduct culture-centric warfare.”

The Army would benefit from developing a cadre of so-called global scouts—”officers and non-commissioned officers, well educated, with a penchant for language and comfort with strange and distant places,” Scales explained. “These soldiers must be given time to immerse themselves in a single culture and to establish trust.”

A greater focus on cultural awareness, he cautioned, also will require adequate resources.

“We are a country that spent billions to gain a few additional meters of precision, a few knots of speed or bits of bandwidth,” he added. “Some of that money might better be spent in proving on how well our military thinks and studies war. War is a thinking man’s game.”

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