Internal Military Think Tanks
A comment by Andy on John’s site that resonates with me:
Remember that this is an Army that took 6 years to produce a new Operations Field Manual despite being involved in two wars.
This is an Army that shelved all the counterinsurgency lessons learned into SF and simply told everyone else to forget about Vietnam.
This is an Army that took over three years producing a new Counterinsurgency Manual (the initial “research” started in 2004 and the manual was released in 2007).
Even Frank Hoffman has tried to minimize 4GW in his “Hybrid War” brief. He states that the theorists involved with it (which really means Lind) have not provided anything to help defeat it. Which is untrue – the FMFM 1-A was written and revised at least three times since 03, and Lind’s Marine seminar with Captains at Quantico has also produced a number of Tactical Decision Exercises, and I think they have been working on a Tactics manual as well.
Of course, Lind does not get paid a dime, the seminar he runs is in addition to all the other coursework the Marines have to do (it’s not credited), and Lind doesn’t belong to RAND, the Army War College, Quantico, or any governmental think tank. In simpler terms, he’s not one of them, and so he must be discredited because he is a threat. Anyone who is a threat to the funding must be discredited…this is SOP for the military these days.
You’d think the stupid bastards, after 7 years of stalemate, would have offered Lind and others positions at the War College, SAMS, or some other think tank…it just shows how inward focused these people are.
-Shlok
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