The US military forgot the lessons of Vietnam in Afghanistan and Iraq

Kabul has fallen. American foreign policy and military doctrine are in disarray.

But it didn’t have to be this way. After Vietnam, the Pentagon adopted a military doctrine called “Air Land Battle,” intended to prevent another Vietnam. It called for overwhelming force, defined objectives, and no mission creep and It proved its worth in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Militaries are designed for combat: to kill and break things. Soldiers are not supposed to play social worker, which has been the U.S. military’s role since Bill Clinton became president in 1993.  Dick Cheney told a press conference that I covered in 2000 that nation-building was wrong. The Bush administration changed course after taking power and consigned America to a new quagmire.

Sun-Tzu wrote in the 5^th century BC that wars are either won or lost before they begin. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam should be taught in the nation’s war colleges as testaments to what happens when political considerations hijack military strategy.

“The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat: how much more no calculation at all! It is by attention to this point that I can foresee who is likely to win or lose,” Sun-Tzu said.

Our defense and political establishment had no idea what it was doing in any of the wars of the past 20 years from Afghanistan and Iraq to supporting jihadists aligned with the Taliban in Syria, and Islamists in Libya. American leaders failed to realize that the South Vietnamese didn’t have the same values as Americans, Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara noted in 1995, saying it was one of the reasons for defeat in Vietnam.

“We underestimated the force of nationalism for a people to fight and die for their cause, namely the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong,” McNamara said. “I think we’re underestimating the power of nationalism in other parts of the world.”

Fast forward 25 years. The Taliban did just that and used the Afghans’ traditional hatred of the outsider to garner recruits. Western minds in the military intelligentsia imbued with Wokeness and Secular Humanist values cannot comprehend this, nor can it comprehend why anyone would die for religion.

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