True, the post-9/11 officer corps now a tremendous amount of hard-earned combat experience. But that experience may not translate well from fighting guerrillas and terrorists to fighting high-tech nation states.
“If you’re a combat veteran, your chances of getting promoted are greater, (but that) means that you have deep searing personal experiences with a certain type of warfare,” said Thomas Mahnken, head of the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments, at Tuesday’s rollout of the report. “That didn’t serve the British and French militaries well” at the start of World War II, he said, when they were so intent on not repeating the horrors of trench warfare that they were blindsided by the new and much more mobile threat of blitzkrieg.