Anatomy of the Long War's Failings.

AuthorZubro, Gordon A.D.
PositionBrief article

Anatomy of the Long War's Failings

By F.G. Hoffman, Research Fellow, Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities

http://www.fpri.org/footnotes/1416.200905.hoffman.longwarsfailings.html

A German general during World War I called the British army, "Lions led by donkeys." British soldiers were superb warriors whose lives the British High Command needlessly squandered by the generals' failure to grasp the emerging strategic issues of combat in the 20th Century. F.G. Hoffman, in a recent talk at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, was equally unsparing of the intellectual and professional squalor of American military and civilian leadership in responding to the strategic landscape in Afghanistan and Iraq. The consequence of their opacity has brought the U.S. to the brink of defeat at the needless cost of thousands of lives of the American infantrymen, "lions" in every sense of the word.

Hoffman identifies three key failures of American military leadership: failure to anticipate, failure to learn, and failure to adapt. The American military was strategically surprised in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Having jettisoned the lessons...

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