 These were the intellectual officers within the army who mounted an insurgency within their own military force, who launched a revolution, a cultural revolution, and a political revolution within the army. These officers, what were they doing in the 80s and early 90s? They were being deployed to places like El Salvador, Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti. To them, these places looked and felt a lot like war, but they weren't getting combat duty for it. It wasn't considered war. They saw these kinds of conflicts as the wars of the future, especially as the Cold War was winding to an end, and yet they saw that their army wasn't equipped for it. It wasn't trained for it. They weren't promoting officers based on their talents for confronting this kind of foe, and so they determined that as they got to a place where they could have influence, that they would try to change the army from within. Well, I think, you know, counterinsurgency has gone through another cycle of ups and downs. It worked to some degree in Iraq. It didn't work at all in Afghanistan because Afghanistan wasn't at all suited for this kind of warfare, as a result of which it's now in a little bit of disarray and delegitimization. But one thing that did happen in this six to ten year period when it was in vogue is that you had an entire generation of officers coming up through the ranks. This is the kind of war that they know. You now have an army chief of staff, General Ray O'Dearno, who is intent on preserving some of these lessons, even though the policy are no longer in effect. And so he is promoting officers who have been engaged in this kind of conflict. He is preserving and updating the kinds of field manuals and doctrinal literature that emphasize these kinds of conflicts. What is changing now is that Obama and the military have decided to move toward what they call a small footprint approach. A year ago, in February of 2012, Obama came out with a strategy review that he presented with the Joint Chiefs standing behind him in the Pentagon. This is known a lot for its emphasis on the pivot from Europe to Asia and things like that. But another important part of it was he said, the army and Marines will no longer size their forces for protracted, large scale stability operations. In other words, no more Afghanistan, no more Iraq. Instead, small scale, special ops forces going in in commando operations, drones, blanching precision bombs, assisting forces that are developing there, assisting allies, not taking a central role in it ourselves. The danger of it is that it's a little too easy. It creates an impression of warfare that is antiseptic, that's almost abstract, that removes us from the mayhem on the ground. And that, unless the commander in chief is very careful about avoiding escalation, can draw us into a conflict. The army, in particular the army, is in sort of an existential crisis. Because what is their purpose, in terms of major combat operations? Don't see many of those on the horizon. The Soviet Union is gone. Russia, it's not gonna be another imperial. They're not gonna start invading Europe. If we get into a war with China, it's not gonna be a ground war. Small stuff, that's mainly special forces. So what is the army doing? The army has been cut back a lot since Afghanistan. But even with the forces as small as they are, 500,000 active duty troops, what are they supposed to do? So that's the real question. What is the purpose of an army? And you can say, well, we're prepared for all contingencies. But you have to set priorities. You have to train for something. You have to have doctrine for something. You have to promote officers on some set of criteria. What's it going to be? During the years of, say, the 90s, it was often said, and it wasn't half wrong, that some of the biggest doves in Washington were the generals in the Pentagon. You really don't want to fight wars. You know, like Colin Powell and the Powell Doctrine, all the different things that you had to satisfy before you even went to war for any reasons. Basically, you had to almost be invaded to meet all of these terms. And in retrospect, these guys may have had it right because the new generation of officers that people around portray, they saw all these conflicts around El Salvador, these small wars that they thought affected our interests and that we had to be prepared to fight. That's another reason why some of the generals were opposed. They said, no, look, you are taking away forces, training from what should be our big mission, which is national defense, which is preparing for the big one, which is preparing for a war that threatens our nation.