THE Strategic Lessons Unlearned from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan: Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold, and the Implications for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan

Military personnel who have experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Vietnam, as well as senior leaders and military historians alike, will find this book by Dr. Chris Mason thought-provoking and useful. Dr. Mason examines indigenous personnel issues at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war and uses empirical data and exhaustive research to argue that all three wars were lost before the first shots were fired-not on the battlefield, but at the strategic level of war. The United States interpreted all three conflicts as insurgencies, Mason writes, when in fact all three were civil wars in which the United States took a side. Success was never possible from the outset, his provocative thesis argues, because none of the three countries were nations for which the majority of their citizens were willing to fight and die. Nation-building is a slow, evolutionary, internal process through which the political identity of the peoples within a country's borders matures over centuries...