Culture-centric war; great idea, only about, oh, three years too late

To be fair, this is probably the “Old Army’s” fault as much as it is the “New Army Secretary of Defense’s” stumbling:

The Dallas Morning News reports on the Army’s latest hearts and minds efforta .

FORT POLK, La. — The meeting with the sheik started well enough. Hands were clasped, tea poured.

“How are the children?” Maj. Elbert Valentine, 38, inquired politely as the U.S. Army officers gathered around a rose-colored carpet.

But the man in the billowing white headdress didn't want to chat about soccer this time. He wanted to talk about Haditha.

“We refuse your presence in our village at all,” he said, staring coldly at his guests.

A hidden camera captured this simulated encounter on a cinema-quality set in the forests of south-central Louisiana. Here at the Army's new "engagement university," Texas troops have been practicing the art of making friends and influencing potential insurgents.

Troops are being trained in “culture-centric warfare,” negotiation and public relations – weapons that the Army says are sometimes more effective than rifle fire in a counterinsurgency campaign.

“We’re not going to win this with guns anymore. You’re going to win with ideas and attitudes,” said Lt. Col. Kurt Pinkerton, 40, of Harker Heights, Texas, the new 2/5 Battalion commander with the 1st Cavalry Division out of Fort Hood, Texas.

The fake sheik, by mentioning the magic word “Haditha,” showed that it’s too late to win with “ideas and attitudes,” too. But, apparently, the soldiers in this exercise are so clueless about this that the “fake sheik” caught them off guard.

If there was a civilian massacre, it involved Marines, not the Army. And whatever happened, it took place last year in another part of the country.

The reason they don’t get it is that our soldiers are so culture-centric that they have a blind spot the size of Texas.

The U.S. military hasn't done enough of (hearts and minds), says British general Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who served with the Americans in Iraq. He has characterized his American counterparts as culturally inept nice guys who inadvertently offended many of the Iraqi people they came to help.

Then, more stating of the obvious, followed by the Army’s “Yeah, right” response:

Critics say it may be too late for the U.S. military to get smart about counterinsurgency in Iraq. But this will not be the last guerrilla threat the U.S. military will face, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., predicted in the January-February edition of Military Review.

C’mon, general; just like you forgot whatever lessons you may have learned in Vietnam, you’ll forget this one soon enough. Or, even worse, you’ll willfully dismiss it with a “that was then, this is now” or “this is the new new Army” mindset.