Lessons Not Learned

Yahoo

09-05-2025

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As this is being written on the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the final end of the Vietnam War, that history is being echoed as we are bombing Yemen and using much of the same tactics we employed in the infamous and ineffectual "Rolling Thunder" campaigns of the mid- and late 1960s in Vietnam.
This got me wondering whether we have learned anything from our failed military adventures. My old man used to say that we learn more from our failures than we do from our successes. The corollary to that is something that I believe came from British field marshal William Slim: "A lesson learned is not a lesson learned unless you learn it."
Although I missed the Vietnam experience, having been commissioned as the war was winding down, I have observed or participated in a number of debacles -- starting with watching the failed Israeli intervention in Lebanon up close as a United Nations observer and ending up as a civilian field adviser in Afghanistan. Let's start with the lessons we thought we learned in Vietnam that have been repeated.
When Saigon fell, there was conventional wisdom in Washington that we should never again try nation-building. However, less than a decade later, we and the Israelis were nation-building in Lebanon.
In the aftermath of the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, President Ronald Reagan had the good sense to abandon the mission as ill-advised. Despite this, we were at it again exactly 10 years later, this time in Somalia. After the Black Hawk Down debacle, President Bill Clinton reached the same conclusion as Reagan in Lebanon and closed the door on the mission.
Being slow learners, by 2002, we were nation-building in Afghanistan. It took two decades to realize that this was folly. We compounded the disaster with the humiliating spectacle of the cut-and-run operation of 2021 in Kabul.
We are still repeating the misperception that wars can be won by airpower alone yet again in Yemen. Beginning with the post-World War II Strategic Airpower Study, the lesson that wars cannot be won solely by airpower has been repeatedly forgotten by successive generations of Air Force and naval aviation strategists. A well-disciplined and ideologically motivated population -- particularly if controlled by an authoritarian regime -- will successfully resist a non-nuclear air campaign. This is particularly true if the air campaign has limited objectives. Shock and awe is a myth that will not go away.
Every rule has exceptions. Weak authoritarian regimes that are unpopular with their citizens can be cowed by selective bombing -- as was the case with Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia during the Kosovo conflict -- but Nazi Germany, North Vietnam and the Houthis fall into the former category. They were made of sterner stuff.
On May 6, President Donald Trump announced the Houthis would stop shooting at U.S. ships transiting the Bab el-Mandab strait at the mouth of the Gulf of Aden off Yemen, but the Houthis denied it. This is again reminiscent of the days of Rolling Thunder.
The Johnson administration would call temporary unilateral halts to the bombing, hoping for a similar response from Hanoi. The North Vietnamese response was to use the pause to replenish their supplies of anti-aircraft missiles. Being unwilling to send ground forces north of the Demilitarized Zone, the Americans would resume bombing. The recent Houthi attack on Israel certainly doesn't look like a peace offering.
Some derisively referred to Rolling Thunder as "Colossal Blunder." Today, we no longer have the option to use ground forces to root out and destroy the mobile missile and drone launchers that the Houthis depend on. This would require a sustained amphibious operation that the U.S. is no longer capable of launching due to some unfortunate force-structuring decisions in the past five years that mean the Navy lacks the ships and the Marine Corps the offensive combat power to conduct such an operation. The geography of the Arabian Peninsula precludes the Army from launching an overland campaign without violating the sovereignty of several of Yemen's neighbors or getting permission to stage an incursion from Saudi Arabia.
How did we get to this point? Much of it can be attributed to casualty avoidance on the part of civilian leaders. Foes such as the Houthis simply can't threaten the standoff capability of our technologically superior Air Force and Navy. In addition, we have not faced a first-class opponent in a conventional war in eight decades.
Much of the problem lies with operational and strategic ignorance on the part of our generals and admirals. The greatest ones have been keen students of military history. This includes Genghis Khan; although illiterate, he hired people to tell him of the battles and campaigns fought by his adversaries. The greats all practiced "recognitional decision-making." They could say, "I remember a reading or hearing of a situation similar to this" and act accordingly.
Too many promising officers are sent to think tanks in lieu of military schools to teach them how to succeed on the Washington cocktail circuit rather than developing real warfighting skills.
This is only exacerbated by ticket punching and careerism. Those officers who see something wrong are afraid to speak up. Generals who knew that the Afghan evacuation would be awful never put their stars on the line to strenuously object. None of the revolving door of commanders in Afghanistan -- with the possible exception of Gen. David Petraeus -- had the guts to say, "This isn't working." Moral courage cannot be taught in schools, but we desperately need it.
Gary Anderson served in Lebanon and Somalia with the Marine Corps. He was a special adviser to the deputy secretary of defense, traveling to Iraq and Afghanistan in that capacity, and served as a State Department field adviser in Iraq and Afghanistan