Case Study 2: Fighting the Last War — Military Doctrine and the Einstellung Effect
The Recurring Pattern
Military history provides the purest repeated demonstration of the Einstellung effect because the military explicitly invests in institutional learning — and still gets trapped.
France, 1940: The Maginot Line
Previous war's lesson: WWI was dominated by trench warfare. Defensive fortifications were decisive. The key to security was building an impenetrable defensive line.
Institutional response: France built the Maginot Line — arguably the most sophisticated fortification system in history. It was engineered to perfection within the trench warfare paradigm.
What the expertise missed: Germany developed blitzkrieg — combined-arms mobile warfare using tanks, aircraft, and radio coordination. The Maginot Line was simply bypassed. France fell in six weeks.
Einstellung diagnosis: France's deep WWI expertise defined "war" as "trench warfare." The Maginot Line was an extraordinarily competent solution to WWI. It was irrelevant to WWII.
United States, Vietnam: Conventional Force Against Insurgency
Previous war's lesson: WWII and Korea were conventional conflicts won through superior firepower, industrial production, and territorial control.
Institutional response: The U.S. deployed conventional military force to Vietnam — massive firepower, territorial control operations, body count metrics.
What the expertise missed: The conflict was an insurgency, where political legitimacy, popular support, and asymmetric tactics were more important than conventional military superiority.
Einstellung diagnosis: The U.S. military's WWII/Korea expertise defined "war" as "conventional conflict." The entire force structure, doctrine, training, and evaluation system was optimized for conventional warfare. Counterinsurgency required a completely different paradigm that the institutional expertise filtered out.
United States, Early Iraq: Conventional Victory, Insurgency Defeat
Previous war's lesson: The 1991 Gulf War was a stunning conventional victory.
Institutional response: The 2003 Iraq invasion was planned as a conventional campaign — and succeeded brilliantly as one. Baghdad fell in three weeks.
What the expertise missed: The conventional victory was followed by an insurgency that the military was unprepared for — again. Despite the Vietnam experience, the counterinsurgency expertise had atrophied because the institutional Einstellung had shifted back to conventional warfare.
Einstellung diagnosis: The 1991 Gulf War had reinforced the conventional warfare paradigm so strongly that the Vietnam-era counterinsurgency knowledge was discarded rather than maintained.
The Deeper Pattern
| Conflict | Previous Paradigm | Einstellung Blind Spot | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| WWI → WWII | Trench warfare | Mobile warfare (blitzkrieg) | France fell in 6 weeks |
| WWII → Vietnam | Conventional force | Insurgency/political warfare | 58,000 American dead; war lost |
| Gulf War → Iraq | Conventional victory | Post-invasion insurgency | Years of insurgency; thousands of casualties |
The pattern is remarkably consistent across different nations, different eras, and different types of conflict. The previous war's lessons become the next war's Einstellung — regardless of how much the military invests in "lessons learned" processes.
Why "Lessons Learned" Don't Prevent the Einstellung
The military invests more in institutional learning than almost any other organization: after-action reviews, war colleges, doctrine development, historical analysis. Yet the Einstellung effect persists. Why?
Because the "lessons learned" process is itself shaped by the current paradigm. The lessons captured are the lessons the paradigm can recognize. Lessons that would require a different paradigm are captured in archives but not in practice — because the practice is defined by the current paradigm's experts, who evaluate lessons through the current paradigm's criteria.
Discussion Questions
- Is the "fighting the last war" problem solvable, or is it an inherent feature of military institutions?
- The military has the most explicit institutional learning processes of any organization. Why don't these prevent the Einstellung effect?
- Compare the military's Einstellung problem to Kodak's. What structural features are shared?
- Design a military training program that would reduce the Einstellung effect without reducing combat readiness.
References
- McMaster, H. R. (1997). Dereliction of Duty. HarperCollins. (Tier 1)
- Nagl, J. A. (2005). Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. University of Chicago Press. (Tier 1)
- Research on military adaptation and institutional learning has been conducted by multiple scholars, including Williamson Murray and Allan Millett's studies of military effectiveness. (Tier 2)