I completely disagree with the “light footprint” concept as it played out in Iraq. Yes, with improper strategy it could have resulted in a “turkey shoot” environment; but the fact of the matter is that the very concept that drove “light footprint” thinking completely missed the point.

When you topple a government, you create a vacuum. Nature and politics abhor a vacuum, and the result was first chaos and then local, regional, national and international strongmen (armed militias.) The real reason we needed 300,000 troops in Iraq was to provide the interim security; to be the government in the absence of Iraqi governance. We totally missed that point. The riots and looting began immediately instead of declaring martial law and controlling the neighborhoods for their own safety. That was just the beginning, but it was a harbinger of an insurgency that degraded into a civil war combined with an insurgency.

The deployment of 300,000 troops would have included this foresight, which was lacking. This foresight would have prevented a turkey shoot, as the results of surge-type social response would have enabled budding organizations to be broken up as criminal elements before they gained tactical legitimacy. Tactical legitimacy and the ability to provide a credible threat on the unconventional battlefield, along with the ability to dominate the population through intimidation, create legitimate insurgents.

Our conventional mindset brought us to the brink of failure and helped destroy public support for the Iraq Campaign in the GWOT.

The recognition at the highest level that the IW environment is not going to go away soon is heartening. It is true that, like admirals fought the submarine, generals will provide resistance to the new. Until the Army begins to predicate preference for officer promotions on proficiency in IW doctrine and practice, this resistance will hold sway. You have to reward productive behavior, just as capitalism rewards productive companies. That’s human nature.

The Special Forces are the most overtasked soldiers in this war. Six months in, six months out (sometimes,) they are in action in many more countries than our conventional forces are engaged. SOF have been underutilized as cadre/trainers for conventional forces engaged in IW, but how was an Army to use them while they are so overcommitted. Those guys deploy a lot.

Add to that the internal enmity between conventional officers and SOF and there you have the breakdown in knowledge transfer.

So, with poor internal knowledge transfer and high-level resistance to adaptation to the current battlefield, it took us five years after intitial employment in Afghanistan to publish doctrine. What the hell, over?

At least the new directive sets IW on the level of legitimacy on the institutional level. Yes, there will be resistance, but it provides hope. Soldiers are smart enough to be trained in using their warrior skills in different environments, but they must be trained. This directive provides general guidance that IW (and its child, counterinsurgency) will be trained to the lower leader levels, where it is actually implemented (“Strategic Corporal, Strategic Captain.)

This directive provides hope.