"In Real Soldiering, Brian Linn demonstrates that each conflict has produced a distinct aftermath army that shares many characteristics with its predecessors. These aftermath armies follow similar patterns of creation and evolution. In the first three to four years after the termination of hostilities, political and military policymakers reform the service based on the perceived lessons of the last conflict. All too often the army, and its historians, have assumed these initial high-level directives, particularly in easily ...
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"In Real Soldiering, Brian Linn demonstrates that each conflict has produced a distinct aftermath army that shares many characteristics with its predecessors. These aftermath armies follow similar patterns of creation and evolution. In the first three to four years after the termination of hostilities, political and military policymakers reform the service based on the perceived lessons of the last conflict. All too often the army, and its historians, have assumed these initial high-level directives, particularly in easily identifiable issues such as doctrine or organization, were soon implemented in the field. But it takes much longer for many of these changes to percolate down to the rank and file. Some never do. For a variety of reasons, among them that politicians seldom fund the changes they impose, organizational inertia, personnel turbulence, and institutional resistance, the aftermath army a decade after a conflict seldom resembles what its creators envisioned"--
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