How to Lose a War or Two: Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Failure of the U.S. Army to Learn from the Low-Intensity Conflicts of the 1990s

Abstract

How to Lose a War or Two:Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Failure of the U.S. Army to Learn from the Low-Intensity Conflicts of the 1990s Benjamin E. Varat (bio) Pat Proctor, Lessons Unlearned: The U.S. Army's Role in Creating the Forever Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2020. xv + 486 pp. Bibliography and Index. $40.00. Pat Proctor's Lessons Unlearned: The U.S. Army's Role in Creating the Forever Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq adds to the ever-growing library of postmortems devoted to what went wrong in these conflicts. Proctor, an Assistant Professor of Homeland Security at Wichita State University, served more than twentyfive years in the Army and retired a colonel. His roles during these years as wartime commander, teacher, analyst, and planner, along with multiple tours of duty in both conflicts provide him the perspective and knowledge to explain why the failures occurred and what needs to be done to prevent a recurrence in the future. There is much to recommend in Lessons Unlearned for historians who study these wars and national security analysts debating the future structure and purpose of the U.S. Army. Nonetheless, a lack of historical perspective beyond the American experience of the 1990s somewhat diminishes Proctor's analysis. Proctor argues that the post-Cold War U.S. Army leadership bears the majority of the blame for why these conflicts unfolded so disastrously. Pulling no punches, he declares on the first page that these failures result from "a deliberately engineered incompetence," a conscious effort to focus planning, training, and force organization on fighting nonexistent peer competitors akin to the Soviet Union during the Cold War (p. 3). Thus, while the U.S. Army today is unmatched in its ability to fight and win a war against a traditional Great Power, Proctor makes clear that this dominant position has come at a tremendous and unnecessary cost: the inability to fight and win low-intensity conflicts, like those that have unceasingly bedeviled U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Proctor embarks upon an "intellectual history" of how and why the U.S. Army failed to learn anything from the numerous low-intensity conflicts it fought over more than a decade from the end of the Cold War to the invasion [End Page 611] of Afghanistan in 2001 (p. 13). A low-intensity conflict, per Proctor's definition, encompasses "operations ranging from humanitarian assistance and disaster relief outside the United States or its territories to counterguerrilla (sic) and counterinsurgency operations" (p. 14). Proctor structures each chapter, save for the first, around case studies of the conflicts of the 1990s and the intellectual response of the Army leadership to these conflicts, as evidenced by official statements, revised war-fighting doctrines, field manuals, and training exercises. For his case studies, Proctor explores U.S. Army interventions in Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo, juxtaposing these experiences with the rationale undergirding the major Army restructurings and modernizations of the 1990s and early 2000s. Chapter One serves the dual role of historical overview and overarching critique. Proctor tells the story of how the Army rose from the ashes of Vietnam to dominate Iraq in the First Gulf War. In these years, the Army went from a conscript to an all-volunteer force and began the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) process of adding ever-more-high-tech means of communication and destruction to its arsenal. Yet even as he tells this apparent success story, Proctor warns that the Army failed to maintain and disseminate the low-intensity-conflict lessons gleaned from the defeat in Southeast Asia. The authors of the Army's field and training manuals excised these lessons over time, and the various Army officer-training centers spent ever fewer hours on low-intensity-focused curriculum. When Congressional legislation in the mid-1980s placed responsibility for low-intensity warfare onto Special Operations Forces (SOF), the Army leadership, focused as always on high-intensity conflict, gladly handed over the portfolio. In Proctor's telling, the nearly effortless defeat of the Iraqi Army in early 1991 seemed to vindicate an Army doctrine that largely ignored strategies for dealing with...