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Anatomy of the Long War’s Failings A German general during World War I called the British army, “Lions led by donkeys.” British soldiers were superb warriors whose lives the British High Command needlessly squandered by the generals’ failure to grasp the emerging strategic issues of combat in the 20th Century. F.G. Hoffman, in a recent talk at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, was equally unsparing of the intellectual and professional squalor of American military and civilian leadership in responding to the strategic landscape in Afghanistan and Iraq. The consequence of their opacity has brought the U.S. to the brink of defeat at the needless cost of thousands of lives of the American infantrymen, “lions” in every sense of the word. Hoffman identifies three key failures of American military leadership: failure to anticipate, failure to learn, and failure to adapt. The American military was strategically surprised in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Having jettisoned the lessons learned in Vietnam and ignored the basic tenets of counterinsurgency warfare; the American military was slow to respond to the emerging strategic landscape in the two theaters. Hoffman notes that the U.S. has belatedly begun to respond to the combat situation, thanks to a handful of generals, most notably General David Petraeus. But the issue is still in doubt and the Pentagon remains resistant to adaptation and innovation. Hoffman does not address the history of foreign armies in Afghanistan. In the past two and a half millennia, no foreign army has succeeded in pacifying the recalcitrant tribal culture in the forbidding Afghan/Pakistani terrain. Can we realistically expect to succeed with our own entrenched, tribalized military culture?
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