We Were Right to Disband Them

AEI.org ^ | December 23, 2004 | Thomas Donnelly

[LS]

Excellent points. I think it is useful to constantly keep things in the "big picture" of time (I'm a history professor, so natch this is my bag). Overall, a freer society will produce better leaders, period. In the short run, you will always have screwups (in the economy, a freer economy will obviously have more business failures than a "planned" economy that does not allow failures). Same in the military: more autonomous leaders means more individual decisions and a relative rise in the proportion of bad decisions (as well as good).

But over the long haul, this can only be good. It's not the most desired form of training, but "on the job" training IS training, and people do learn from their mistakes. For ex., the Army already figured out that in the "new" volunteer Army in a war zone, everyone must be completely combat ready---there are no "specialists" who just serve meals or do communications. It already has adjusted its training regimen---whether enough or not, we'll see, but this has been the approach of the Marines for some time.

Afghan/Iraq will create a generation of unmatched military leaders---I dare say, the result will be a corps of officers that surpasses the Mexican War group of Grant/Lee/Sherman/Longstreet/Stuart etc. These men and women will be trained in counterinsurgency like nobody's business.