From the preface to Harlam Ullman's new book
Anatomy of Failure: Why America Loses Every War It Starts:
Since the official end of the Cold War in 1991, remarkably, the United States has been at war or engaged in significant military conflicts and interventions for over two-thirds of the intervening years. . . . .Wars and conflicts in Iraq in 1991; Somalia, 1992-93; the global war of terror, and Afghanistan, 2001-present; Iraq, 2003-present; and Syria and Yemen since 2006 represent a total of nineteen of the past twenty-six years in which the nation's armed forces have been engaged in combat! . . . The only outright victory in the past six decades was the first Iraq War in 1991
Ulman sets out to examine why we have failed so consistently in our military adventures. This is an important book, not only to understand why we have failed so consistently in the past, but to understand what must be done to prepare the nation for the uncertain and highly dangerous future we face. Certainly the inexperience of our recent presidents in both parties (with the possible exception of the first President Bush) is a factor, as is the outdated Washington groupthink of the advisors they had and still have to draw on. But Ullman argues for a more comprehensive approach to building national strategy, based on a better understanding of our opponents and a more aggressive use of red teams to question and test the assumptions underlying our decisions to go to use military force.
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