The tank is dead on the battlefield, missiles have made amphibious landings impossible, drones have changed the nature of war. All of this tripe has been bought by military professionals who ought to know better. I think much of this is due to a lack of serious study of military history, art, and science in our nation’s war and command and staff colleges. Mark Twain was correct when he said, “History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” There are patterns of conflict that hold true from generation to generation. I pick on Berger … because he acted on his conclusions prematurely in a disastrously rash manner. As an example, after the battle of Crecy during the Hundred Years’ War, the king and marshals of France concluded, after their drubbing at the hands of the English, that cavalry was dead and that infantry was the new king of the battlefield. Thirty years later, at the Battle of Poitiers, the French cavalry was ordered to dismount and attack on foot uphill against the English. The only difference was that it took longer for the dismounted knights to come within range of the English longbows. Again, they were decimated and their king captured. At Agincourt, in 1415, the French attacked mounted; the result was the same, the French cavalry was slaughtered again. The key to all this was technology. The English longbow could penetrate the armor of men and horses at a stand-off range that made frontal cavalry charges suicidal. In future conflicts, the French learned to negate the longbow by use of heavier armor, crude artillery, and forcing the English to attack by skillful French use of defensive tactics on well-chosen ground. It would not be until the 17th century that infantry took the position of prominence that it would maintain until the period between the American Civil War and World War I, when a combination of rifled weapons, the machine gun, and indirect artillery fire forced the development of the tank, and another revolution in military affairs followed. As World War I approached, many thought that the observation aircraft would make the entire battlefield transparent to one side or the other, just as some thought drones would dominate early in the Russo-Ukraine war. The advent of the fighter plane in the Great War and counter-drone technologies in Ukraine should have put to rest both those notions fairly quickly. Again, history rhymed. It took the French about a century to recognize that the pattern of conflict had changed technologically. It took only months for the Americans — north and south — to recognize the value of armored warships, and they did it simultaneously, resulting in the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack at Hampton Roads. (RELATED: We’ll Need Innovation to Fight China, But Will We Have it?) Although technology changes, the patterns of conflict do not. There is good evidence that our ancestors discovered the flanking or envelopment movement at least 20,000 years ago while hunting bears and protecting themselves from sabertooth tigers. One or more individuals would distract the animal from the front while others attacked from a vulnerable flank with spears. They probably learned it from watching wolf packs hunt larger animals and eventually adopted the tactic in conflicts with other tribes. (RELATED: Drones: We Aren’t Ready for the Next War) Although the scale of battles and technology has changed, it is the same tactic used by U.S. forces in Schwarzkopf’s great envelopment during Operation Desert Storm. Technology causes the means to differ, but the basic nature of war remains immutable. The greats of military history were students of history; even the illiterate Genghis Khan studied by listening to captive Chinese historians. The great Swedish warrior-king Gustavus Adolphus studied the combined-arms tactics of Alexander the Great as he developed his own combined arms theory during the Thirty Years’ War. Alexander was also a genius of siege warfare. In one famous incident, he had his heavy engineers turn the island of Tyre into a peninsula in order to get at it. Tyre remains a peninsula to this day. Technology had changed, but the theory remained sound. Gustavus had artillery and firearms, whereas Alexander had archers and spears, but the concept remained valid. Gustavus made his artillery lighter so it could keep up with the rest of the army. This combined arms concept allowed him to outmaneuver and outshoot other European armies whose lumbering artillery trains could not keep up with the main body of their forces. The technology had changed, but Gustavus recognized the patterns. Of the modern strategists who made premature decisions about the future direction of warfare, the poster boy is David Berger, the former Marine Corps commandant. He misinterpreted all three of the assumptions listed in the first paragraph. Unfortunately, Berger was not just an armchair strategist; he had the power to implement his ideas, and he did so. (RELATED: The Feather Merchants: Senior Leaders Subverted the Marine Corps) In his 2019 reorganization of the Marine Corps, Berger did away with the Corps’ tanks, heavy engineers, much of its wheeled artillery, and aviation to buy missiles and radar sensors to implement a concept that he dubbed “Force Design.” He used early lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian War to justify many of his conclusions. Since then, both sides have learned to put screens above their tanks to protect them from overhead drones. Anti-drone technology has led to a stalemate on the battlefield, both sides rely on heavy engineers for fortification, and anti-missile technology has negated much of the reliance that Berger put on claiming the obsolescence of amphibious shipping. (RELATED: The Marine Corps Has Gone Off the Rails) I pick on Berger, not because others did not draw wrong conclusions about the future of conflict, but because he acted on his conclusions prematurely in a disastrously rash manner. He actually drew those conclusions prior to the Ukraine conflict. He cherry-picked the events in the Russo-Ukraine war to validate those premature notions that he had already drawn, and consequently transformed the Marine Corps away from being a world-wide general purpose force-in-readiness to concentrate primarily on China. There is evidence that the Marine Corps is backing away from Force Design and trying to rebuild itself. However, many of the senior officers who served under Berger will find it hard to undo his mistakes. (RELATED: The Case Against the Marine Corps Commandant) Force Design may exist on paper for a few years, but hopefully, it will evolve into something resembling the combined arms force that Berger inherited in 2019. The best that former and current Marines can do is to help them make the transition back to sanity. READ MORE from Gary Anderson: The Counterattack on Bad Bunny Half-Time The US Navy Gets Fit Is the Internet the Antichrist? Gary Anderson retired as chief of staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. He was a special advisor to the deputy secretary of defense and is the author of Beyond Mahan: A Proposal for a U.S. Naval Strategy in the Twenty-First Century.