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BY SHAWN BRIMLEY AND VIKRAM SINGHleven years after the last American soldier left Vietnam, Andrew Krepinevich published “The Army and Vietnam,” a blistering critique of failure to adapt during the war and the subsequent purging of critical lessons learned about counterinsurgency. Then serving as an Army major, he described nothing short of a “system reboot” in which the military “uninstalled” important innovations and reverted to a system focused only on major force-on-force combat.

We do not want an Army major to write “The Army and Iraq” sometime after 2020 as he watches hard-won innovations from his company command days in Diyala slip out of America’s arsenal. This may seem fanciful now or even a product of paranoia. But there are clues — from the resources committed to today’s ad hoc adaptations, from history and from the nature of big bureaucracies — that another “system reboot” is possible.

Such a reboot would involve both active removal of some innovations from the system and malign neglect of others. The result would be a military that claims to be ready for “full spectrum” operations but has actually prepared primarily for the wars it wants to fight: those that look like the first six weeks of the Iraq campaign. This article describes the concept of a system reboot and explores three critical errors that could contribute to such a national failure with terrible costs.

We define a system reboot as the purging from the military system those innovations that are most associated with a campaign that is considered a failure. Three levels of system error can lead to a reboot:

å Application errors. Innovative programs and capabilities used in the field are tainted by strategic failure and tend to be neglected or removed from the system.

å Operating system errors. New doctrine, organizations and other systems that push beyond core service concepts are eliminated or ignored when the immediate need passes and it proves uncomfortable to make improvements permanent.

å User error. Wary of repeating mistakes, policymakers and the public stop supporting innovations associated with an unsuccessful campaign.

Errors in any one dimension, and especially in combination, can lead to a system reboot. These have occurred before, most recently in the period after Vietnam, when the U.S. military as an institution fell back onto what Krepinevich so aptly called the “concept” — the preferred paradigm of conventional warfare.

The introductory chapter of the new Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual states that “The story of how the Army found itself less than ready to fight an insurgency goes back to the Army’s unwillingness to internalize and build upon the lessons of Vietnam.” The post-Vietnam purge of capabilities and doctrine optimized for counterinsurgency has come back to haunt us in Iraq.

Well into the sixth year of the so-called “long war,” the military has made significant progress in creating innovative capabilities, concepts and doctrine that are optimized for counterinsurgency and irregular warfare. Battlefield lessons learned are being gathered and taught with unprecedented speed; the Army and Marine Corps are changing their training and education; doctrine for everything from counterinsurgency to stabilization and reconstruction operations is being developed and improved rapidly. Collaborative efforts are indeed advancing the common good through innovation.

So why worry? Although some call us paranoid, we believe there is sufficient evidence to justify warning of a system reboot. Indeed, the fact that so many current innovations are simply reincarnations of past adaptations is sufficient cause for concern. Good innovations must not only be preserved, but also moved out of their “beta-testing” phase to be continually built on and improved.

The process of rediscovering and relearning Vietnam-era innovations has come at great cost in American blood and treasure. A future generation must not be forced to relearn the lessons of Iraq. As Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in a recent speech, “This work and these lessons in irregular warfare should not be allowed to wither on the bureaucratic vine.” Unfortunately, preventing a system reboot is easier said than done.

ERROR 1: SOFTWARE/APPLICATIONS

Military capabilities are somewhat analogous to the programs and applications one uses on a computer system — they each do different things and are designed and used for specific purposes. Some applications can be used for reasons other than that which they were principally designed for. As an example, one can build a matrix of data by using a word processor, but it would be more efficient and effective to use a spreadsheet application. In similar ways, conventional American military units are being used to advise and train Iraqi units for counterinsurgency, as there are not enough soldiers specifically trained, equipped and tasked for that mission.

But although some in the Army are attempting to build a robust advisory capacity and other capabilities designed for the indirect approach, this type of application is difficult to permanently install on the U.S. military system. After all, there were some impressive examples of innovative capabilities that were victims of the post-Vietnam system reboot — several have eerie similarities to innovations struggling to persist today.

Impressive examples of wartime innovation during the Vietnam War included those capabilities designed and optimized for foreign internal defense. The Civil Operations and Revolutionary (later Rural) Development Support (CORDS) teams were unique civilian-led capabilities that are credited with making substantial progress in training and advising local security forces from 1967 to 1972. The CORDS system began right at the top of the U.S. military structure in Vietnam. The head of CORDS, first Robert “Blowtorch” Komer and later William Colby, was appointed by the president and served as deputy commander of the American military mission in Vietnam. From the national to the district level, fully integrated civilian and military CORDS teams helped to establish unity of effort, and according to a description in the new COIN manual, “by 1972 had largely uprooted the insurgency ... and forced the communists to rely more heavily on infiltrating conventional forces from North Vietnam and employing them in irregular and conventional operations.”

Unfortunately, the unique and effective CORDS capability did not survive the post-war system reboot. Civilian officials from the CIA, State Department and United States Agency for International Development were reassigned, lessons went unlearned and the capability was lost to the history books. CORDS fell victim to its association with Vietnam and was purged from the system.

The modern equivalent of the CORDS effort is the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) that the U.S. and several allies are using in Iraq and Afghanistan. PRTs were first developed in Afghanistan and are now at least claimed to be a central effort in Iraq. However, there is much anecdotal evidence that persistent staffing, funding and turf battles have greatly constrained the effectiveness of PRTs — especially in Iraq. The ad hoc nature of the PRT development process has hampered effectiveness. For example, unlike the CORDS system, which was fully integrated within the U.S. military command structure in Vietnam and thus sufficiently resourced, the chronic difficulties many PRTs have in even securing transportation in Iraq reveal the difficulty in attempting to graft interagency capability onto the military system, rather than developing such civilian-military capabilities from within. Put another way, CORDS was far more innovative as it constituted a general upgrade of the political-military system in Vietnam, and the modern PRT is, at best, a temporary software patch that is easily bypassed, ignored or deleted.

Another notable example of innovation from the Vietnam era was the military advisory effort whereby small units of Americans were embedded in Vietnamese units or located within villages. Thanks in large part to the writings of Bing West, the most well-known small-unit innovations were the Marine Combined Action Platoons that lived and fought in Vietnamese villages. These Marines trained and led the local security forces and were instrumental in denying critical villages to insurgents in the northernmost provinces of South Vietnam. Other advisory efforts included Mobile Advisory Teams that worked with regional and provincial forces. These and other embedded advisory efforts were never resourced commensurate with their potential strategic value and were purged during the post-Vietnam system reboot. Many combat advisers were not promoted as quickly as their peers who served with conventional combat units, and many retired early. Even special operations forces in the post-Vietnam era endured a 70 percent reduction in manning and a 95 percent reduction in funding.

Current efforts at advising Iraq’s security forces are being implemented by so-called transition teams. Well into the fifth year of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the U.S. military had fielded only about 6,000 advisers. The 11-man military transition teams (MiTTs) are small and must stay together for force protection. Larger “super-sized” transition teams are required if the advisory effort is to have a decisive effect in Iraq. Moreover, the Army is not making the current advisory mission a high enough priority with adequate resources and personnel or properly rewarding soldiers who are assigned to advisory teams. Those who are assigned — many volunteer — are doing a brave and noble service, but the Army still has not made the development of an effective combat advisory capability a priority. The advisory effort constitutes a critical element of any responsible way forward and out of Iraq — at some point a reduced U.S. force posture with an emphasis on advising will occur — but the mission has thus far been poorly resourced, understaffed and far too ad hoc considering the importance of the mission.

The frustration many feel with the current PRT system and the military advisory effort is justified, as it reveals the extent to which these critical capabilities are struggling to function within a system that is largely incompatible with robust civilian-military interagency teams and embedded advisory missions. During wartime, necessity is the mother of innovation, but it would be a real mistake to assume that the near real-time adaptations that are occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan will survive within a system that is inherently uncomfortable with them.

How might the war in Iraq have proceeded had the post-Vietnam system reboot that erased CORDS and the combat advisory capabilities not occurred? How would the post-invasion Phase IV efforts in Iraq have developed had the U.S. spent the past 40 years refining and institutionalizing the adaptations that occurred in the later years of the Vietnam War? No one can answer that question, but it is disturbing to consider that had the post-Vietnam system reboot not occurred, the U.S. would have had a pre-existing set of powerful capabilities optimized for counterinsurgency that would have positively influenced American performance and perhaps altered the evolution of the war.

ERROR 2: OPERATING SYSTEM

The second type of error occurs in the overall “operating system” of the Defense Department: the doctrine, organizations, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, and facilities that build and maintain military capabilities. Tactical and operational imperatives in the field drive innovations such as CORDS, advisory missions and the PRTs discussed above. But installing and running these new applications requires appropriate changes to the operating system to provide the right human and materiel resources and support. For the most part, short-term patches enable the military to run new “non-native” applications such as MiTTs. The best of the operating system patches can provide a foundation for a significant and permanent upgrade. So far, improvements in doctrine and training provide the most hope for institutionalizing successful innovations.

Training needs to build the skill sets that will enable U.S. ground forces to adapt to future military operations with rapid and constant transition between offensive kinetic operations, stabilization and humanitarian efforts. Doctrine derived from the painful experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan can ensure that troops are better prepared in the future and should drive other changes across the system. But upgrading doctrine without the proper organizations, people and materiel will not result in a long-term capability. If the huge level of effort to improve doctrine does not spark innovations across the system, the risk of Error 2 will be significant.

Although they succeeded masterfully in their conventional core mission to close with and destroy the enemy in the invasion of Iraq, U.S. ground forces struggled to adapt for long-term counterinsurgency efforts. This was made more difficult by the failure of senior military and civilian leaders to recognize and rapidly shift resources to a different kind of mission. Despite a slow start, the training component of the operating system has evolved. Pre-deployment exercises at the Joint Readiness Training Center, the National Training Center and the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center now feel and look like counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, with mock Iraqi or Afghan villages and on-site role players as everything from angry civilians to tribal sheikhs, from journalists to aid workers. Scenarios at these facilities can be updated with real-time information from the actual battlefield — even including the details of recent after-action reports from the combat zone — which enables units in training to confront the latest enemy tactics. Beyond this training for combat forces, to build better advisory capabilities, the Army moved from ad-hoc reliance on individual augmentees to a consolidated 60-day training program for Army advisers at the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Realizing the gap in doctrine for counterinsurgency (the last major manuals were written 20 years ago for the Army and 25 years ago for the Marine Corps), the Army put out an interim field manual in 2004. It set then-Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, now the overall commander in Iraq, in partnership with Marine Corps Lt. Gens. James Mattis and James Amos to the task of pulling together a writing team unique in the history of military doctrine. The new Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual, published last December, was written to provide troops in Iraq and Afghanistan “a solid foundation for understanding and addressing specific insurgencies.”

Doctrine and pre-deployment training are important, but they are far from sufficient. Writing doctrine does not ensure adequate resources. Modifications to pre-deployment training for today’s conflict can be undone rapidly when the immediate needs recede. Training efforts in Fort Leavenworth continue to be under-resourced, and the best personnel in the Army are not being sent to training teams in Iraq.

The warning here should come again from the Vietnam era: Army FM 31-16, “Counterguerrilla Operations,” was published in 1967; FM 31-73, “Army Advisor Handbook for Stability Operations,” was issued that same year. There was a Military Assistance Training Advisory course system in place in 1962; and the Stillwell Report in 1961 recommended that counterinsurgency have “equal prominence” with conventional and nuclear war. Despite the prominence of the 2006 COIN manual and the sincere efforts of the training centers, what ensures they will persist and grow as budgetary pressures increase in the coming years? Although Army leadership will scoff at the suggestion, it remains possible that, once again, the Army may neglect or drive out its developing experience and expertise in counterinsurgency.

ERROR 3: THE USER

Like any system, the military has a user — in this case the people and leadership of the United States. Defense professionals who read this publication will draw different lessons from Iraq than will the average government or citizen “user” of the military instrument of national power. Military readers will generally agree that following the successful invasion of Iraq, the U.S. failed to quickly transition to stability and counterinsurgency operations needed to keep things under control. A common sentiment will be a “too little, too late” assessment of the surge. Blame will be placed at the feet of civilian leaders for strategic miscalculation and also with military leaders for failure to plan and prepare the force for a long counterinsurgency mission.

The broader civilian population, on the other hand, will generally describe the war with three words: “No more Iraqs.” If the Iraq critics’ meaning is “no more strategically ill-conceived wars of choice for which we are unprepared and toward which we commit insufficient resources,” then this sentiment will not trigger Error 3. However, we expect the desire for “no more Iraqs” will be a key driver of Error 3 if the American people and their leaders conflate strategic, operational and tactical shortcomings in Iraq with the inadequate organization and capabilities in the military and the U.S. government as a whole for any counterinsurgency or large-scale foreign internal defense mission. A general resistance will likely develop to capabilities that are perceived to be optimized for the Iraq conflict. Error 3 is beyond the span of government control. The danger is that it will contribute to Errors 1 and 2, and perhaps many years down the line, leave us again unprepared for the wars we need to fight.

The sentiment that we should not “prepare for the last war” is acceptable — no one wants to repeat the Iraq experience. But the path to Iraq is not the only way to end up in a counterinsurgency. The capabilities being built now, largely a result of the war in Iraq, are the same capabilities needed in Afghanistan, the same needed to help other nations such as the Philippines confront violent extremism, and likely the same that would be needed against any conventional enemy that has watched and learned from our performance in Iraq over four years. Eventually, a conflict of necessity chosen by an adversary will arise — and he will play to our weaknesses, not our strengths.

Error 3 is tempting and comfortable. The hypothetical Andy Krepinevich we discussed in our introduction could easily be preceded by a future Col. Harry Summers, determined to validate the vision of military transformation unsullied by the Iraqi desert in which speed and the ability to decisively engage with and destroy the enemy will be the key to victory. This argument will focus on civilian strategic failure, bad decisions by Paul Bremer, and the assertion that, without the dissolution of the Iraqi Army and deBaathfication, “shock and awe” would have been sufficient. Under this narrative, the civilians lost Iraq, the military did its job and the experience need not be repeated. China or some other yet unidentified threat will predominate.

If argued well, this view could be embraced by the military, by Congress and by the American people. No one wants to build the kind of capabilities we need to deal with the virulent insurgency in Iraq. Doing so suggests that we will have to fight such wars, which put our military men and women in terrible danger, last many years, are rarely decisive, and put tax dollars in all the “wrong” places — military pay and training rather than major weapons systems. It will be easy to get seduced back into preparing for the wars we want to fight, rather than the wars we will need to fight. Even now, many are looking for the compelling case to move America back to a war-fighting paradigm focused on high technology, information dominance and destroying the enemy from the air.

Although the military cannot prevent Error 3, how leaders within the Defense Department, and in particular, the Army and Marine Corps, react to it could be decisive. It seems unlikely today, but as wartime supplementals dry up, budgets get tighter, and support for counterinsurgency operations declines, the services will have to advocate for every dollar for every program to build and preserve irregular warfare capabilities. The inspiration for doing this will have to come from the moral imperative to never again send soldiers into an insurgency or similar environment unprepared.

WARNING: PREPARE NOW

It’s 2020. Seeing little hope of advancement, our future author’s best colleagues have carried their first-hand counterinsurgency know-how into retirement a decade earlier than necessary. Service schoolhouses teach counterinsurgency theory, but 90 percent of training focuses on traditional skills. Innovative language proficiency programs and unusual career tracks such as the Army adviser have largely been abandoned. Although the U.S. conducts many more train-and-equip missions for indigenous forces overseas, it relies almost exclusively on contractors. Strained by continual deployments, Army Special Forces and SOF conduct only 20 percent of the training and advising missions they performed in 2001, and their target lists keep growing. The counterinsurgency manual was last updated in 2012, and the Defense Department directive on stabilization and reconstruction operations gathers virtual dust in a Pentagon database.

Although we believe this is a possible picture of the future, it is important not to be paranoid. There are structural elements that lessen the chances of a post-Iraq system reboot. Unlike the post-Vietnam era, there will be no Soviet bear waiting for us in Europe when we leave Iraq. Afghanistan will remain a vital effort in which the innovations described above will remain relevant. Countering violent Islamist extremism will require a robust set of capabilities that are designed to be used by, with and through host nation security forces. Indeed, the last Quadrennial Defense Review stated that “helping others to help themselves is critical to winning the Long War.” But we believe it is dangerously naïve to assume that important tools for the so-called “indirect approach” will not be threatened by a post-Iraq reboot of the national security system just because they appear in doctrine and strategy documents. We must be vigilant now to avert a possible system reboot or the pernicious effect of accepting but neglecting to resource and further develop innovative capabilities.

“After the Vietnam War, we purged ourselves of everything that had to do with irregular warfare or insurgency, because it had to do with how we lost that war,” former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Jack Keane said in a recent interview. “In hindsight, that was a bad decision.” The innovations running now on the military operating system need to move out of beta testing and become permanent applications available to military commanders. This requires refinements, improvements to “debug” the new programs and to upgrade the entire system to run them effectively with adequate resources. We are convinced that the post-Iraq era will not be conducive to this upgrade process.

As we consider the real and unfortunate prospect that America will not meet its preferred strategic goals in Iraq, the next generation of defense leaders and analysts must not allow another post-war system reboot. It will require effort at every level to identify and advocate for capabilities, to preserve and refine doctrine,to build new organizations, and to combat bureaucratic and institutional resistance. Only vigilance by those who lived through the mistakes of recent years and want to avoid them in the future can limit the chance that a post-Iraq “system reboot” will first erode and then destroy today’s wartime innovations that will be vital to success in tomorrow’s conflicts.