[7thson]

And one thing the author missed, the reporters have no concept of, yet all of us who have served know about. The war colleges. The military sends out officers - captains and colonels - to these war colleges to learn what, where, when, why, and how to fight the next enemy or enemies. We go over old strategies and cover new ones. Even this campaign, some things have gone wrong, and the war colleges will go over this and pick it apart. Correct me if I am wrong, but is England the only other army that does this?

[ladtx]

Good point.

[cavtrooper21]

No, the old USSR tried to do this same thing, but hampered by politics, it never really got off the ground. The Soviet Navy was much better at learning from history, but the specter of political oversight still had its effects. I would imagine that they have given some thought to reviving this, but given the social and economic troubles that they are having, it may be years before they put something together that even comes close to the US and the UK.

[dead]

And one thing the author missed, the reporters have no concept of, yet all of us who have served know about. The war colleges.

And the flip-side of that is journalism school, where the reporters are educated.

There they learn that any American show of force will be met with almost superhuman resistance from a bottomless pool of noble savages. The resultant loss of incompetent American soldier's lives will bring to the homefront inner city riots, flowery love-ins, and stirring acoustic folk music from unshowered poets. At that point, the country will throw their guns into the sea, turn against and impeach their Republican leader, and come to love higher taxes and Dingell Norwood.

[ExpandNATO]

Just about every Western and Asian country has a war college, the only question is how effective they are. Personally, it sounds to me like the spirit of the old German general staff has left Germany and set up in the US (and do not go PC on me and claim that this is a bad thing).

[El Gato]

Correct me if I am wrong, but is England the only other army that does this?

No, the Russians at least at one time, had a pretty good war college system. The problem there was that the top slots rarely went to those who really understood the lessons, and the lessons themselves were too colored by the Communist version of political correctness, (or is "communist version" redundent?) I think even the French once had such a system. Japanese too, IIRC. The Germans, along with the British I think, pretty much invented the whole idea. Actually it was the Prussians rather than "the Germans" in general. The quintessional Western war theorist was after all a Prussian, Karl Von Clausewitz.