Questioning the generals

What is this?  How could anyone question our infallible generals this way?

An informed strategic perspective on readiness and modernization, which is a component of readiness, broadly defined, is essential to making the right choices on operational and tactical readiness.   In 1939 the French army was supremely ready for the kind of war it knew how to fight, wanted to fight, and which it assumed (or hoped) the Germans would fight.  The French army also fielded air and ground technologies that were qualitatively competitive with those of the Wehrmacht.  However, those technologies were present on the battlefield in very limited number because, during the interwar period, the French General Staff felt safe only in repeatedly and indiscriminately carrying new technologies into full-scale production.

I recently re-read David Halberstam's masterpiece on Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest which ought to be required reading for every commissioned officer in the United States.  One of the aspects of our defeat there that really jumps out even 20 years after Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City is the stunning combination of material readiness and intellectual unreadiness with which we entered Vietnam.  We had enormous quantities of people, mobility, and firepower dedicated to the war effort. But we were utterly - and happily - ignorant of Vietnamese society and history, and especially of our Vietnamese adversary's character and style of warfare.  Worse still, civilian and military leaders alike believed that knowledge of such things really didn't matter; what counted was only that which could be counted, and we had overwhelming numbers of everything. We were going to fight our kind of war in Vietnam, and the enemy would simply have to submit.  Like the French in 1940, we were superbly ready: they for World War I, and we for another Korean War.  (my emphasis in bold)

- Jeffrey Record, Ready for What and Modernized Against Whom? A Strategic Perspective on Readiness and Modernization Parameters (US Army War College) Autumn 1995

I guess our generals at least got beyond their "fighting the last war" approach.  In Iraq, they didn't try to fight the Vietnam War.  They were still tryingto fight the Korean War.