The Agile Minds of the US Army

David Brooks rightly credits the US Army with a swift and dramatic change in intellectual approach over the last 5 years.

They say that intellectual history travels slowly, and by hearse. The old generation has to die off before a new set of convictions can rise and replace entrenched ways of thinking. People also say that a large organization is like an aircraft carrier. You can move the rudder, but it still takes a long time to turn it around.

Yet we have a counterexample right in front of us. Five years ago, the United States Army was one sort of organization, with a certain mentality. Today, it is a different organization, with a different mentality. It has been transformed in the virtual flash of an eye, and the story of that transformation is fascinating for anybody interested in the flow of ideas.

Gen. David Petraeus, who had an important role, spoke about the transformation while accepting the Irving Kristol Award Thursday night from the American Enterprise Institute. I spoke to him and others about the process this week.

The transformation began amid failure. The U.S. was getting beaten in Iraq in 2004 and 2005. Captains and colonels were generally the first to see this, but only a few knew how to respond. Those who did tended to have dual personalities. That is, they had been steeped in Army culture but also in some other, often academic, culture. Petraeus had written a dissertation on Vietnam at Princeton. H.R. McMaster, then a colonel, had also written a book on Vietnam. Others were autodidacts and had studied the counterinsurgency tactics that had been used in Malaysia, Algeria and El Salvador.

They’d been trained to use overwhelming force to kill bad guys. They’d been trained to see terrorists as members of networks, almost like computer networks, and to focus on disrupting the nodes where networks joined. But in the theater they sometimes saw that the more force you unleashed, the more enemies you generated. The network metaphor could be misleading because it ignored geography, the importance of holding ground.

It's amazing how your life-and-death survival can sharpen your ability to think critically and adjust courses of action.

By: Brant