Pat Proctor’s Lessons Unlearned: The U.S. Army’s Role in Creating the Forever Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq adds to the ever-growing library of postmortems devoted to what went wrong in these conflicts. Proctor, an Assistant Professor of Homeland Security at Wichita State University, served more than twentyfive years in the Army and retired a colonel. His roles during these years as wartime commander, teacher, analyst, and planner, along with multiple tours of duty in both conflicts provide him the perspective and knowledge to explain why the failures occurred and what needs to be done to prevent a recurrence in the future. There is much to recommend in Lessons Unlearned for historians who study these wars and national security analysts debating the future structure and purpose of the U.S. Army. Nonetheless, a lack of historical perspective beyond the American experience of the 1990s somewhat diminishes Proctor’s analysis. Proctor argues that the post-Cold War U.S. Army leadership bears the majority of the blame for why these conflicts unfolded so disastrously. Pulling no punches, he declares on the first page that these failures result from “a deliberately engineered incompetence,” a conscious effort to focus planning, training, and force organization on fighting nonexistent peer competitors akin to the Soviet Union during the Cold War (p. 3). Thus, while the U.S. Army today is unmatched in its ability to fight and win a war against a traditional Great Power, Proctor makes clear that this dominant position has come at a tremendous and unnecessary cost: the inability to fight and win low-intensity conflicts, like those that have unceasingly bedeviled U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Proctor embarks upon an “intellectual history” of how and why the U.S. Army failed to learn anything from the numerous low-intensity conflicts it fought over more than a decade from the end of the Cold War to the invasion

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如何输掉一两场战争：阿富汗、伊拉克以及美军未能从 1990 年代的低强度冲突中吸取教训

帕特普罗克特的教训：美国陆军在阿富汗和伊拉克制造永久战争中的作用增加了不断增长的事后分析库，专门研究这些冲突中出了什么问题。Proctor 是威奇托州立大学国土安全部助理教授，在军队服役超过 25 年，并从一名上校退休。这些年来，他担任战时指挥官、教师、分析员和规划师，以及在两次冲突中的多次执勤，为他提供了解释失败发生原因以及需要采取哪些措施以防止未来再次发生的观点和知识. 对于研究这些战争的历史学家和讨论美国陆军未来结构和目的的国家安全分析家，《未学到的教训》中有很多值得推荐的地方。尽管如此，缺乏超越 1990 年代美国经验的历史视角在某种程度上削弱了普罗克特的分析。普罗克特认为，冷战后的美国陆军领导层要为这些冲突如此灾难性地展开承担大部分责任。他毫不留情地在第一页宣称，这些失败是“故意设计的无能”造成的，这是一种有意识的努力，将计划、培训和部队组织的重点放在与冷战期间类似苏联的不存在的同行竞争上（第. 3). 因此，虽然今天的美国陆军在对抗传统大国的战争和赢得战争方面的能力是无与伦比的，但普罗克特明确表示，这种优势地位已经付出了巨大而不必要的代价：无法在低强度冲突中作战并赢得胜利。 , 就像那些在阿富汗和伊拉克不断困扰美军的人一样。普罗克特开始讲述美国陆军如何以及为何未能从冷战结束到入侵的十多年间进行的众多低强度冲突中学到任何东西的“知识史”