Is it expertise or a mental rut?

A friend pointed out an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal to me:

Gen. McChrystal's decision to set up a Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell means creating a corps of roughly 400 officers who will spend years focused on Afghanistan, shuttling in and out of the country and working on those issues even while they are stateside.

Today, units typically spend six to 12 months in a war zone, and officers typically spend only a couple years in command before getting a new assignment. This undermines the continuity needed to prevail in complex environments like Afghanistan or Iraq. Too often, just when soldiers figure out what's going on they are shipped back home and neophytes arrive to take their place. Units suffer a disproportionate share of casualties when they first arrive because they don't have a grip on local conditions.

There was a saying that we didn't fight in Vietnam for 10 years; we fought there for one year, 10 times. The North Vietnamese, on the other hand, continued fighting until they were killed or immobilized. That gave their forces a huge advantage.

It's worth reading the whole article, as Max Boot lays out a good thumbnail synopsis of the arguments both for and against longer deployments and "going native."

I spoke briefly with a Canadian general on this topic awhile back, and he mentioned that familiarity cuts both ways: after six months of hard fighting against the Taliban - like Ian Hope's or Omer Lavoie's troops did, for example - it's easy for a soldier to see every Fighting Age Guy (a politically incorrect acronym, but it's what serves) as a Talib gunman, every white Toyota as a VBIED, every upset farmer as an enemy informant, every kite flown by the side of the road as a semaphore signal to a hidden foe. Is that soldier the guy you want executing the next phase of the mission, having to cooperate with the Afghan locals as we move to more of a reconstruction posture? In other words, does that experience do more harm than good as the mission evolves?

My friend says:

We didn't fight WWI or WWII on 6 or 9 month rotations...If I recall we won those.

We are at war in Afstan, not policing the Balkans - are our 6-9 month rotations a peacekeeping hangover?

Of course, we didn't fight either of those wars with a small, 100% volunteer army, either. And neither of those fights was a generational COIN war.

You could go back and forth on this all day...hopefully with a few pints in front of you to lubricate the debate. But this is one question with no easy answers, I'm afraid.