Over on his Middle East Blog , Marc Lynch asks whether the Iraq war will change how scholars study the Middle East. It’s a question he has been pondering for sometime since taking over as director of the Middle East Studies program at the Elliott School of International Affairs:
Graduate programs in political science and Middle East Studies have already begun to see a steady flow of applicants back from Iraq (including, among many others, my research assistant from last year). I expect that over the next decade, this will turn into a flood as smart, young veterans look to put their experiences into a broader perspective and to apply their hard-won granular knowledge to broader academic and policy problems. (And not only military veterans — there are plenty of civilians, contractors, and NGO workers who have worked in Iraq as well.) Most will pursue MA degrees, while some percentage will decide to continue on to a PhD I think this an unequivocally good thing — and I wonder if people have given serious thought to how it might change the field of Middle East studies.
It’s a fascinating question and one that we in London should be thinking about – identifying the young up-and-coming MA/PhD students and helping them find their way into think tanks, NGOs and government service.
It reminds me of a story I have been told by numerous military folk about a young lance corporal on his Junior Command Course in Brecon. The story goes that a senior NCO was giving a lecture on counterinsurgency and spent much of his time describing the campaigns in Malaya, Oman and Northern Ireland. During the Q&A session the young lance corporal put his hand up and asked the senior NCO a question about Afghanistan and Iraq. The senior NCO couldn’t answer the question – his only experience, he said, was in Northern Ireland, so he asked the assembled group who had had experience in Afghanistan and Iraq – almost everyone raised their hands… soon the senior NCO was listening to tactics learnt in the fields of Helmand and from the streets of Basra.
Afghanistan and Iraq have had a profound impact on the British Armed Services – men and women in their twenties and early thirties have been deployed seven or eight times which, in turn, is having a major impact on the culture of the armed forces. A generation of young officers and NCOs who have fought in Helmand and Southern Iraq now look up to their seniors (Staff Sergeants/ Lt Col’s* above) who’s only experience of warfare and conflict resolution may have been on the training fields of Germany, Canada or Thetford. It’s crucial therefore that the armed forces suck this experience up, promote those individuals who have proven themselves on the ground and not stifle innovation and change as new strategies and tactics are learnt and taken on – in other words and as Paul Cornish describes not let the armed forces melt into strategic decay by failing to adapt, learn and move forward. As Thomas Friedman argues in a recent op-ed:
All those deployments have left us with a deep cadre of officers with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, now running both wars … They know every mistake that has been made, been told every lie, saw their own soldiers killed by stupidity, figured out solutions and built relationships with insurgents, sheikhs and imams on the ground that have given the best of them a granular understanding of the “real” Middle East that would rival any Middle East studies professor.
The Ministry of Defence has kicked off a strategic defence review. It would be a fascinating experiment and potentially hugely valuable exercise if the three services could identify a handful of experienced Officers and NCOs to write their own paper on the future of the armed forces – with a view of publishing it in one of the many defence academic journals – or even run a one day conference where they present their views…
Inside the military Generation Y has reservoirs of experience and knowledge to tap into. Senior Commanders should openly embrace this potential and allow these ideas and discussions to take place. The old guard’s time is nearly over. May be it’s time to hand over the controls.
* Senior Commanders are being deployed into theatre – the point here is that their collective experience is less and arguably less helpful than the experience of those junior NCOs / officers who have yo yo’d backwards and forwards between the UK and Iraq and Afghanistan and will become the next generation of leaders.
