The Army way of war...

[Judge]

I talk about the adaptability of our forces, here's a book dealing with the same - Brian McAllister Linn's The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War. He shows the campaign in Iraq, for example, was not one conflict but several, one form succeeding the other in rapid succession.

That has been the pattern from the beginning in Iraq, where our fighting men and women conquered a conventional force in the dizzyingly successful initial campaign, then were surprised by the part-criminal, part-ideological insurgency that followed. They adjusted and crushed the large-unit insurgents, faced a new threat from small-unit insurgents using booby traps, and adjusted again to limit the effectiveness of such attacks. Seeing the hostile elements turn toward localized attacks on civilian populations to try to foment civil war they adjusted once again with the surge to provide localized security for Iraqi civilians. And all this was done while training Iraqis to do the job themselves.

The "way" is not a fixed tactic but the mental attitude of our troops and their ability to innovate/adapt.