The U.S. Armed Forces' View of War

Abstract

© 2011 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences BRIAN MCALLISTER LINN is Professor of History and Ralph R. Thomas Professor in Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. His publications include Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Paci1⁄2c, 1902–1940 (1997) and The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (2000), both of which received the Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award, and The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War (2007). His current project is Elvis’s Army: Transformation and the Atomic-Era Soldier, 1946–1965. Despite the continual issuance of buzzwords emphasizing service unity and harmony–such as “jointness,” “An Army of One,” or “The Few, the Proud”–the armed forces’ internal divisions have been vividly displayed during the last decade. A number of important books detail the disagreements between civilian and military leaders and the long struggle to implement the “surge” and the counterinsurgency (coin) strategy.1 The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have generated a radical transformation in military thought: that is, a paradigm shift from idealized, techno-centric, scienti1⁄2c formulas–such as “network-centric warfare” (ncw) or “effects-based operations” (ebo)–to more complex, ambiguous, and human-centered visions of war, which were encapsulated in 2007 by The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.2 This intellectual renaissance has led, according to some, to military victory in Iraq and a path to eventual success in Afghanistan. This interpretation is attractive because it implies that the U.S. armed forces are adaptive, learning organizations that will develop new concepts to replace failed ones. But it begs a number of central ques-