Learn it the hard way and you own it

ARTICLE: Report Cites Firefight as Lesson on Afghan War, By THOM SHANKER, New York Times, October 2, 2009

An example of Afghanistan-specific learning within the U.S. military.

Our military owns these lessons intensely, because they earned them the hard way.

The danger here: a new administration comes in and has little respect for that learning, because it did not participate in them and therefore does not "own" them.

Comments

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De Javue . . This has happened before. While the Viet Nam war may be dis-similar in geography and technology, the same mistakes happened over and over again at that time . . failure to recognize historical simularities by command will continue to create the same incidents, again . . over and over again . . just in a different place with different people doing it.

Some sort of continuity must be established by command, from the top down, and as has been noted, it hasn't. And until it does, two things will occur. American G.I.s are going to die and a lot of Afghans are going to be pissed off . .

The politicians need to get their circus together and decide whether "victory" is going to be total surrender of the people within both Afghanistan and Pakistan, or just keeping their killing of each other at an acceptable number so that none venture outside either country and kill somebody else . . Funny thing abut war, it's kind of like pregnancy, it either is or it isn't, there aren't many grey areas . . Apparently our politicians don't understand that at all . . and never have . .