I don't know a great deal about the specifics of combat army training. My expertise is more in the aerospace world in that sense.
To see the transferability of a training scenario that centres upon counter-insurgence operations from the Afghan experience, on the assumption that then this is transferable to other potential future combat environments, is dangerous, because I'm not convinced. For one thing, the lesson of military operations, historical military operations, not just for the forces but for most western armies, is this sense that we can train with an understanding based upon past experiences.
I will give you the most prominent example. From the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War, allied armies were trained to expect a repeat of World War II in a nuclear environment. There were a lot of people, a lot of academics, who argued very strongly that given their very structure, allied armies would not be able to manage this in a nuclear environment, and that it would require a dramatic restructuring of the forces, which never took place.
It cannot help because of the limited duration of training you get.... In my view, with experience as a teacher, if you will, an educator, the students will simply integrate the dominant model and they will not be very good at trying to understand how this will spread out, at the difference between, for example, operating in a combat environment of a neutral population, to a pro population, to a hostile population, to one with no population—I mean, historically people flee armies. And you just can't do it. The danger is we've been trapped in past experiences. That's what I would concern myself with.
As regards the question of education, I think the education side is the most vulnerable right now because it's really about the future, educating the enlisted personnel, but most importantly educating the officers, the young officers, who in five to ten years will increasingly be taking up command positions. There's a tendency that will exist to try to squeeze that, because this has always been a bit problematic with the forces, which values operational experience over educational experience, and I don't think that has greatly changed in terms of just the way militaries think about themselves. The need to maintain, do everything they can, to keep those forces immediately ready for the unexpected, based upon past experience, will lead them to push or to squeeze these down the road. That may work for a short period of time, and you might hope that things will get better and we'll be able to restore these, but it's losing those capabilities, or those being seriously damaged in the immediate future, like losing a capability, a fighter jet capability—they're hard to restore and they take time and investment. I think the forces have to be very careful about where they try to look because, as I said, I think that's the most vulnerable.