Re-connecting Army training to Army combat

A new article in Survival argues that the big mistake the Army made in the 1990s was moving officers out of the Training and Doctrine Command and replacing them with retired guys. This inadvertently disconnected those  who fight from those who train to fight, severing an essential feedback loop, say the authors, Army Capt. Jaron Wharton and some other guys.

This disconnect screwed up the Army for the first few years of the war in Iraq, they say, but then the situation righted itself when officers returning from Iraq after one or two tours there began pushing for changes in Army Training and Doctrine.

Their argument intrigues me. I think Wharton and his buddies may be right. Also, I wrote a whole book about the early years of the Iraq war and this thought didn’t occur to me.

These guys are too polite to say it, but I am not: Where was the Army Training and Doctrine Command when the counterinsurgency manual was written? As best as I can tell, the contractor-heavy crowd down at Fort Monroe, Virginia, played no role in it. Am I wrong?

Army.mil/Flickr