ENFR

What is a ‘Lesson’ in Military Terms?

The definition of lessons learned is “the adding of value to an existing body of knowledge, or seeking to correct deficiencies in areas of concepts, policy, doctrine, training, equipment or...
Major John N. Rickard, CD, PhD September 8, 2020
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September 8, 2020

Major John N. Rickard, CD, PhD

The definition of lessons learned is “the adding of value to an existing body of knowledge, or seeking to correct deficiencies in areas of concepts, policy, doctrine, training, equipment or organizations, by providing feedback and follow-on action.”  By way of example, in 1918 Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Currie observed that

In order to prepare for the coming test [100 Days], and with the lessons or previous fighting fresh in my mind, it was resolved that every effort should be made to bring the Corps to the highest possible fighting efficiency.  … Lessons from previous fighting had shown that certain branches … should be strengthened and reorganized. The Engineers and Machine Guns in particular were not able to accomplish their tasks in battle without drawing heavily on the Infantry for additional personnel. 

A ‘lesson’ is an identified factor that had a high degree of correlation with an outcome, and therefore can be equated to a ‘cause.’ The strength of the correlation would assist in the differentiation between primary and secondary. 

The lesson (cause) from an event that has occurred can only have potential utility for a new event yet to occur. This is why the Army needs to think in terms of the probability of success or the outcome of a military event.  The lesson is not proven until it works. It can have real meaning when applied against some future action similar in nature and character to the action from which the lesson was derived. Second, radical differences in circumstances can lead to profound insights. The necessary caveat is that the radical differences are clearly recognized and that an intellectual framework for comparison is created.  The process of historical comparison which leads to a conclusion that War X and War Y are not comparable, in that they do not shared enough key similarities to permit lesson transfer, is an important stage in dominating any future situation. Both mental approaches act as a safeguard against what Frederick referred to as “servile imitation.” 

I will now explore four categories of lessons. The ‘type’ or ‘minor’ lesson is relatively easy to identify, like “Integral echelon support is difficult during decentralized Arm[oure]d operations.”

Yet the most important lesson categories for achieving Cognitive Dominance are ‘transient’, ‘enduring’, ‘false’ and ‘lost.’ The transient lesson is one that is highly contextual in time, place, geography and opponent. For example, Steven Metz has argued that “Counterinsurgency might not be the best response to insurgency. Over the past fifty years, the concept of counterinsurgency has become so encumbered with implications and ‘lessons,’ many of them derived from the Cold War, that it is time to move beyond them.” 

The ‘enduring’ lesson is one which persists through time and context. In the realm of strategy, for example, Edward Luttwak asserts that even two thousand years of technological change have not rendered the lessons of the Roman experience obsolete.  The principles of war and the concept of combined arms could be considered enduring lessons derived from military history.  One of the most enduring lessons is the tendency for commanders to believe what they want to believe. For example, there were many indications of German capability to attack in the Ardennes in December 1944 that were ignored by Bradley and Eisenhower because they believed the Germans were merely running out the clock.  Examples of this type litter the annals of military history. 

The omni-directional nature of battlefield threats in history could be considered an enduring lesson. Current thinking (in some circles) posits that this is a modern phenomenon of asymmetric warfare. Yet the British War Office concluded in 1943 that

A most important lesson-though by no means a new one-that was learned by hard experience is that everyone in a theatre of war, whatever his rank or arm of the service, is a fighting soldier. In a situation where frontages are extended, localities widely separated, and enemy patrols active, there are many opportunities for enemy infiltration … there were numerous instances of clerks, cooks, batmen, and drivers being compelled to fight. 

Consider also Paul Johnston’s assertion that “historically, attrition has been central to settling the outcome of virtually all major wars. Military historians may choose to decry this, but the pattern is strong enough that, if we are to learn anything from history, we ought not ignore it.”  Is this a false lesson or an enduring lesson? Stephen Biddle has argued that change is inevitable, “but so is continuity” and current debates “systematically exaggerates the former and slights the latter.” Major warfare since 1900, he declared, has “actually seen much less real change than most now suppose,” and that “expectations of a looming revolution in military affairs are both a serious misreading of modern history [emphasis added] and a dangerous prescription for today’s defense policy.”  Properly categorizing Biddle’s thesis could be considered a prerequisite for anticipating change. 

The ‘false’ lesson is a flawed deduction flowing from ignorant or untruthful interpretation of an event, a false premise, or cognitive confusion due to rapidity of analysis.  False lessons can also be characterized by (1) linear projection; (2) hasty-ill-considered adaptations; and (3) fixation on past success.  Colonel Thomas X. Hammes suggested that “We can trace a logical, coherent evolution from Mao to the events taking place in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Chechnya today.”  The Israeli Defence Force’s overreliance on Effects-Based Approach to Operations, specifically the idea that air power could terminate wars on Israeli terms more effectively than could ground manoeuvre, could be considered a false lesson.  Indeed, the argument that air power can win wars by itself continues to reverberate and could be considered a false lesson. 

Although it is easy to create categories of lessons, there is guarantee that the war being studied will yield neat categorization. Confusion should be anticipated. Consider Second British Army’s problem with anti-tank gun doctrine in Normandy. The two main types of country encountered were the rolling, open, corn-lands and the close, stiffly hedged, ‘bocage.’ Both were thoroughly difficult anti-tank country. “It is thus extraordinarily hard,” offered observers, “to come to the correct conclusions as to what our armament should be – and to sort out the real from the false lessons [emphasis added].”  Consider also the widely-held opinion that war is more lethal now, despite the fact that battlefield deaths have declined.  The argument is useless unless the Army analyst precisely defines the context and parameters used to make the assertion. 

The ‘lost’ lesson is perhaps the most unfortunate in that it is unconsciously forgotten due to the nature of bureaucratic processes or institutional cognitive fatigue/poor record keeping. General William E. Dupuy, commander of Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), was staggered by the rate of loss in tanks, vehicles, artillery and aircraft during the 1973 Yom Kippur War to the point where he spoke of the “new lethality” of the battlefield. He observed that the Israelis discarded their all-tank doctrine for combined-arms manoeuvre, and deduced that this was a major lesson.  Yet the IDF’s wrong lesson deduced from the Six Day War that tanks alone could be decisive in the future in a counterattack role, served as the basis of Dupuy’s claim to have identified the correct lesson of the Yom Kippur War, that combined arms was the key to success. This is an example of a lost lesson. 

The conservatism of armies yields little apparent advantage in terms of retaining sound lessons, for as Lord Keyes observed, “we are slow to learn and quick to forget, and the lessons that we might have learnt from a study of previous operations are often only learnt by trial and error and bitter experience in each successive generation.” 
 

Notes

  1. DAOD 8010-0, Lessons Learned, 30 April 2004.
  2. Lieut.-General Sir A.W. Currie, Canadian Corps Operations During the Year 1918, Interim Report, Ottawa: Department of Militia and Defence, n.d., c.1919), 3.
  3. See Philip Hayward, “The Measurement of Combat Effectiveness,” Operations Research 16, no. 2 (March-April 1968): 314-323.
  4. Martin van Creveld, “Thoughts on Military History,” Journal of Contemporary History 18, no. 4 (October 1983): 560.
  5. Jay Luvaas, ed., Frederick the Great on the Art of War (New York: The Free Press, 1966), 49.
  6. Army Lessons Learned Centre, Lesson Synopsis Report (07-003), Tanks Employment in Southern Afghanistan, 11 May 2007.
  7. Steven Metz, Learning from Iraq: Counterinsurgency in American Strategy (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2007), 76. See also Colonel Gian Gentile, Wrong Term: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counter-Insurgency (New York: The New Press, 2013).
  8. Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), xi.
  9. Captain Jonathan M. House, Towards Combined Arms Warfare: A Survey of 20th Century Tactics, Doctrine and Organization Research Survey No. 2 (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Combat Studies Institute, 1984).
  10. See John Nelson Rickard, “December 1944: Eisenhower, Bradley and the Calculated Risk in the Ardennes,” Global War Studies 8, no. 1 (2011): 7-34.
  11. War Office, Notes From Theatres of War No. 13: North Africa-Algeria and Tunisia, November 1942-March 1943, May 1943, p. 3.
  12. Paul Johnston, “The Myth of Manoeuvre Warfare: Attrition in Military History,” in Allan D. English, ed., The Changing Face of War: Learning from History (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 22-23; Ralph Peters, “In Praise of Attrition,” Parameters 41, no. 4 (Winter 2011/2012): 1. 
  13. Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), ix. 
  14. Joseph J. Collins, “Desert Storm and the Lessons of Learning,” Parameters 22, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 83.
  15. Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (St. Paul, MN: Zenith Press, 2004), xiii.
  16. See Anthony H. Cordesman, Lessons of the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah War. Washington, D.C.: The Centre for Strategic and International Studies Press, 2007) and Russell W. Glenn, All Glory Is Fleeting: Insights from the Second Lebanon War (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2012).
  17. The Invasion of Western Europe, RA 2 Army Arty Notes No. 2 (period 19 Jun – 6 Aug), File 215B2.013(D3), RG 24, Volume 10,554, LAC. 
  18. Colonel Trevor N. Dupuy, “War Since 1945,” Marine Corps Gazette 69, no. 8 (August 1985): 57-9.
  19. Major Paul H. Herbert, Deciding What Has to Be Done: General William E. DePuy and the 1976 Edition of FM 100-5, Operations Leavenworth Papers No. 16. Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: Combat Studies Institute, 1988), 31, 33.
  20. Lord Keyes, Amphibious Warfare and Combined Operations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943), 7.