If recent events are any guide, an unacknowledged conviction of too many of those responsible for national security decisions, civilian and military, is that history has little to offer today's defense policy maker. Beset by accelerating change, current senior leaders seem to have neither the time nor the inclination to look to the past for help. Events crowd one another too rapidly. Technology matures too quickly. Crises succeed each other too abruptly. Coping with a demanding present and confronting an ominous future, few current civilian and military leaders seem willing to indulge in systematic reflection about the past.

Too harsh a judgment? How else to explain political and military assumptions preceding the 2003 invasion of Iraq that largely ignored the history of the region, planning that discounted postconflict challenges that had arisen even in the much less complicated overthrow of Manuel Noriega's corrupt Panamanian regime a mere thirteen years earlier, and the slowness only thirty years after Vietnam to recognize and deal with the insurgency that followed the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime? Overconfident in their ability to control the future, those responsible for planning the invasion chose deliberately or by oversight to ignore history. The future, unfortunately, turned out to look all too much like the past. As Yogi Berra might have put it, Iraq was déjà vu all over again. That, too, is a dismally familiar historical phenomenon.