REVERSAL There is never any value in fighting the last war. But while you’re eliminating that pernicious tendency, you must imagine that your enemy is trying to do the same—trying to learn from and adapt to the present. Some of history’s worst military disasters have come not out of fighting the last war but out of assuming that that’s what your opponent will do. When Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, he thought the United States had yet to recover from “Vietnam syndrome”—the fear of casualties and loss that had been so traumatic during the Vietnam period—and that it would either
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