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“The best way to destroy a subject is to make it mandatory.”

Actually, I agree with this “Islam is not the enemy” policy, but for odd reasons.

Conventional military doctrine is at its best when it is “faceless”, that is, “red vs. blue”, or as some wit put it, “In war, the enemy always attacks from the top and the right, with the *defenders* on the bottom and the left.”

Note that the vast bulk of such training assumes that the “good guys” are fighting in the defense, not in the attack.

Cultural difference are for unconventional warfare training, where soldiers have to learn how to rub elbows with “the greasy natives”, eat weird food, not use local deities as boot scrapers, that sort of nonsense, which is essential to their doing their job.

And it is here, too, that institutional knowledge, informally from other soldiers, as well as non-military authorized book reading come in real handy, as they are devoid of p.c.b.s., and call a Wahhabi a Wahhabi, and worse.

Likewise, soldiers have very long memories about who and what they encounter. Privates can have p.c.b.s. slung at them all day by civilians or bored 2LTs who have been ordered to give p.c.b.s. classes; but when their E7 tells them who is doing what to who and why, he is the one they both believe and invest in.

And they will faithfully pass on *that* knowledge once they become E7s as well.

A great example of this institutional knowledge is how long and how bitterly the Army remembered the treachery of the Democrat controlled congress at the end of the Vietnam war. How it betrayed their allies and friends.

This meant that when they were tasked to rebuild the Iraqi military, they went at it with a singular purpose, that being that it would not matter if and when congress again betrayed the Iraqis. They would have enough knowledge and training to succeed on their own.

The bottom line to all of this is that conventional forces need to not personalize their training. It shouldn’t matter to them if they are fighting Swedes one day and Somalis the next. They treat all fairly and based on how the enemy behaves.

Unconventional forces, on the other hand, take care of business their own way, including their less than doctrinal knowledge base. If they need information, they get information. They don’t wait until it is given to them.