Lessons Unlearned

Pat Proctor, Colonel, US Army, Ret., is a veteran of both the Iraq and the Afghanistan wars. He recently served as a chief of operations group at the Mission Command Training Program and currently is an Assistant Professor of History at Wichita State University. He is the author of Containment and Credibility: The Ideology and Deceptions that Plunged America into the Vietnam War. He lives in Leavenworth, Kansas.

A brutally honest, thought-provoking, and brilliant examination of the American military’s failure to adapt to post-Cold War realities and understand the challenges of the post-9/11 world; and a compelling warning against completely jettisoning hard-won lessons eventually learned in Iraq and Afghanistan while (understandably) shifting priorities to the potential of large-scale combat in an era of renewed great power rivalries." —David Petraeus, General, U.S. Army, Ret., former Commander of the Surge in Iraq, Coalition Forces in Afghanistan, U.S. Central Command, and former Director of the CIA"Dr. Proctor's critiques of the past are hard-hitting, but even for those of us who would not go quite so far, his clear-eyed emphasis on the importance of future stabilization and counterinsurgency missions is compelling in a world heading soon for 10 billion humans and many dozens of megacities—with enormous nontraditional threats of great potential consequence to American national security lurking within.” —Michael O’Hanlon, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of The Future of Land Warfare"Having done his homework thoroughly and having deployed widely in Iraq and Afghanistan, Colonel Pat Proctor has sallied forth to challenge U.S. Army doctrine. How does an organization prepare and perform to win both an unlikely major war and the every-day skirmishing called low-intensity conflicts? Proctor has the courage and intellectual firepower to challenge the status quo and to prescribe deep, real changes.” —Bing West, co-author with Jim Mattis of Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead" —Colonel (Retired) Pat Proctor has written an extremely thorough study of the history of the US Army from the fall of the Soviet Union to the present day, examining how the world's most professional and capable land force has struggled so mightily to succeed in two counterinsurgency campaigns. His conclusion—that the Army failed to prepare for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan despite considerable evidence that these were the kind of wars it was going to fight in this century—rings true and is informed by his own experience during so much of that time period. Highly recommended." —John Nagl, Headmaster at The Haverford School, author of Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice"Will contribute to very important debates about the future of the Army." —Richard A. Lacquement Jr., United States Army War College, author of Shaping American Military Capabilities after the Cold War.