LTC John Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife deals in large part with the United States Army as a learning organization during the Vietnam War, and compares it to the British Army's performance in Malaya.  His contention that in order to successfully wage war, particularly when fighting insurgencies, military organizations need to learn from their experiences.  In his estimation, during and after the Vietnam War the U.S. Army became a learning organization.  I saw the types of behavior in the limited training I received as an Army ROTC cadet back in 1990-92 - after action briefings, training scenarios, lessons learned, etc... were a big part of what we did.  You would think that with this background and the difficulties faced in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army would be pushing the concepts of learning through experience even more.

Unfortunately, as Abu Muqawama (aka Andrew Exum) points to Tom Ricks' new series of articles at Foreign Policy's website about the experiences of part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Wanat and Elizabeth Rubin's New York Times February, 2008 story about Battle Company's problems in the Korengal River Valley to show that this may not be the case.  The official investigation of the 173rd's problems at Wanat seem to bear out this interpretation.  While Abu Muqawama saw a parallel with Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy, which I'm still working through, I see parallels not only with the French efforts to build small-heavily defended outposts throughout Vietnam during the First Indochina War and the siege of Dien Bien Phu, as illustrated by Fall's Hell in a Very Small Place.

The troops at Wanat particularly seem to fit the bill.  Like the legionnaires at Dien Bien Phu, the platoon (Second Platoon, Chosen Company, 503rd Infantry regiment) at Wanat did not get anything like the amount of materiel needed to build proper fortifications, reducing the height of the barriers so that they could be filled with earth by hand.  Second Platoon also didn't have adequate water available to them onsite, lacked observation posts, and didn't have dedicated surveillance or air support.  One explanation is that th effort was part of an effort to do counterinsurgency "on the cheap" by using too few troops to provide security and then not providing enough support in case things went bad.

It seems obvious that lessons learned from Vietnam and Iraq, or even elsewhere in Afghanistan would limit both these types of situations and the instinct to sweep issues under the rug so that good men would not die in vain, but go read the investigation comments and see what you think.  Maybe the folks in the 173rd are learning from the incident, but what about the rest of the Army?  When and how do this get disseminated to them?

A positive note does appear in this article in The Weekly Standard, which points to efforts to repeat the success of "The Awakening" that was the key to the success of the Surge in Iraq (don't kid yourselves, 20,000 more troops was not enough on its own, a combination of factors was required).  The obvious question is whether an Awakening type of phenomenon is even possible in Afghanistan, which presents a radically different problem that that found in Iraq.  Can the United States and NATO find charismatic local leaders who are willing to stop the violence and support the Karzai government, which has limited legitimacy to begin with?  If Western military forces pull back and avoid conflict or even visibility that could antagonize people, does that really fix the problem, or actually worsen it?  These are all things that people more familiar with Afghanistan than I am are going to have to answer.

Regardless, the Army and the DoD need to get back to the hard hitting lessons learned process that the National Training Center was famed for, and start looking at Afghanistan with a critical eye so that mistakes are avoided in the future.  This can only be good for both the troops and the Afghanis.