An interesting article by Lt. Col. John A. Nagl and Lt. Col. Paul L. Yingling titled “New Rules for new enemies” was posted in the October issue of Armed Forces Journal.  Part of their argument centers around a requirement to restructure the organizational culture of the US army.

To win the Long War, the Army must develop a more adaptive organizational culture. To create such a culture, the Army must change its focus from a centralized, specialized focus on major conventional wars to a more decentralized and less specialized focus on full-spectrum operations. This shift in organizational culture cannot occur within existing organizations — indeed these organizations can be an impediment to change. The best way to change the organizational culture of the Army is to change the pathways for professional advancement within the officer corps. The Army will become more adaptive only when being adaptive offers the surest path to promotion.

Indeed, the US military provides us with one of the best recent examples of a classic problem in professionalization - how a profession adapts to changing tasks.  This problem for the professions is quite clearly illustrated in the war in Iraq.  The US Army, much less so than the British, has concentrated on state vs. state combat in conventional attacks.  The quality of the practice and training for the profession were, internally and with a few exceptions, centered around this type of combat scenario, while many of the lessons of the Vietnam War were institutionally “forgotten”.

The institutionalization of the “conventional war” paradigm is clearly apparent in the career track for officers and NCOs - the “professional practitioners” - and the tasks were all based on this paradigm.  When the insurgency started, many of these officers and NCOs had no training in how to even recognize what was happening, let alone deal with it.  Today, over three years after the start of the war, the US army is starting to move more towards a task model that includes COIN operations - something that the US Marines under Gen. Mattis had done as early as 2003.

There is a lesson in this for all professions - adapt or die.  This may sound harsh but, when a series of professional tasks looses real world relevance, that profession looses its status and their jobs disappear.  This loss of task relevance may come about as a result of changes in technology (e.g. the disappearance of the Railway medical systems of the late 1800’s), as a result of changes in technique (e.g. conventional military vs. insurgency), or as a result of a perceived loss of relevance for the ideology espoused (e.g. Rome’s pagan priesthood).

For the conventional militaries of the world, it will be interesting to see if they learn the lessons being taught to the Americans in Iraq and the Israelis in Lebanon.  Certainly Hezbollah and the various insurgency groups in Iraq have learned the lessons well.