Believe it or not, I was a fan of Rumsfeld reforming the military back in 2000. A smaller, more mobile (and cheaper) army seemed like a good idea and I believed him when he said his critics were just old Army guys who didnt like change.
But that was PEACETIME.
When I watched those videos of looters after the war, and Rumsfeld discounting them as the "same video clip of looting a vase over and over again", I knew things had gone wrong. Very wrong.
One can never go back and change the past but you sure can write a lot of books about how "it should have been". The hard part is separating the wisdom from the armchair quarterbacks.
As Iraq War Rages, Army Re-Examines Lessons of Vietnam
Recent Books Pan Doctrine Of Overwhelming Power When Fighting Guerrillas
A Gift for Donald Rumsfeld
March 20, 2006
"Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife : Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam" by John A. Nagl
The last time Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Baghdad, back in December, the top U.S. military commander there gave him an unusual gift.
Gen. George Casey passed him a copy of "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife : Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam", written by Lt. Col. John Nagl. Initially published in 2002, the book is brutal in its criticism of the Vietnam-era Army as an organization that failed to learn from its mistakes and tried vainly to fight guerrilla insurgents the same way it fought World War II.
In the book, Col. Nagl, who served a year in Iraq, contrasts the U.S. Army's failure with the British experience in Malaya in the 1950s. The difference: The British, who eventually prevailed, quickly saw the folly of using massive force to annihilate a shadowy communist enemy.
"The British Army was a learning institution, and the U.S. Army was not," Col. Nagl writes.
Col. Nagl's book is one of a half dozen Vietnam histories -- most of them highly critical of the U.S. military in Vietnam -- that are changing the military's views on how to fight guerrilla wars. Two other books that have also become must-reading among senior Army officers are retired Col. Lewis Sorley's "A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam", which chronicles the last years of the Vietnam War, and Col. H.R. McMaster's "Dereliction of Duty : Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam", which focuses on the early years.
