Because most nations are involved in wars so infrequently, we tend to forget the details. This leads to making the same mistakes again and again. Among the current examples of selective memory are electronic jamming, land mines and chemical weapons.

Electronic jamming is nothing more than using radio transmitters to broadcast static towards the enemy to screw up their signals. Radio, TV, radar and all manner of electronic devices can be distorted. It really makes life miserable for officers trying to run a battle, or even a training exercise.

As a result, most armies have electronic jamming equipment, but they rarely use it in training exercises. Why? Because the jamming knocks out radio communications, or makes radios, radar and the like more difficult to use. Navies are also prone to this attitude, although air forces are not.

It seems pretty silly to not practice operating with jamming going on because it makes life so difficult. Since a major purpose of training is to expose the troops to the rigors of combat before they face it for real, this aversion to playing with electronic warfare seems self-destructive.

Much of this has to do with the peacetime preference for form over substance. A successful field exercise is one in which everything goes according to plan. Soldiers faced with the real possibility of death on the battlefield tend to like predictability. But nothing is as unpredictable as combat. And most soldiers are familiar with the old saying, "no plan survives contact with the enemy." Yet the peacetime desire for predictability overwhelms the knowledge that skipping training with the jammers will make battlefield exposure to enemy electronic warfare even more painful.

This sort of thing has happened before. Perhaps the first weapons to become too scary to think about, or train with, were the chemical weapons. Used extensively during World War I, poison gas horrified the soldiers, and civilians, more even than the more lethal bullets and shells that caused most of the casualties. Officers did not like chemical weapons for that reason, as troops hit with gas were more prone to panic.

When the idea of outlawing chemical weapons arose during the 1920s, the generals made only token resistance and gas has been avoided in combat ever since. But everyone still had chemical weapons, and extensive equipment for protecting their troops in case someone else gots desperate and uses forbidden weapons.

Then, in 1969, the U.S. Army was accused of gassing a bunch of sheep in Utah. (It was an accident, if it happened at all, as it turned out.) Then, it came out that the U.S. Army had earlier used human subjects for testing several types of chemical weapons. Congress decided that chemical weapons were too dangerous to have in the arsenal. The generals, terrified that Congress might cut their budget or not approve promotions for generals, did away with the Chemical Corps, which took care of all matters dealing with using, and protecting the troops from, chemical weapons.

The Soviet Union took notice of this (the details came out after the Cold War ended). Realizing that the United States was now more vulnerable to chemical weapons, they expanded their chemical arsenal. In two years, the Soviet "Chemical Corps" went from a little over 40,000 troops to almost 200,000. The Soviet stocks of chemical shells and bombs quadrupled.

The Soviets changed their war plans to include more extensive use of chemical weapons. During the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the Israelis captured a lot of Soviet chemical decontamination equipment from the Egyptians. In fact, the Egyptians lost much more chemical warfare gear in that war than the United States possessed. Congress found out about this and panic set in. America was not only unable to wage chemical warfare, but could not even protect its own troops against chemical attack. The U.S. quickly got back into the chemical weapons business.

We also tend to forget that, although chemical weapons have been outlawed since the 1920s, they have been used many times - always against nations that had no gas to pass back at you, or protective gear to protect their own troops.

Land mines are the most recent attempt to declare a weapon beyond the pale and not suitable for use by civilized nations. Nations are disposing of their anti-personnel mines, although they are keeping their ability to clear them. They will need that, for less civilized opponents will use mines extensively against nations that have officially forgotten what these nasty little devices are all about.

A bad memory and fondness for faulty logic is often the cause of wartime disasters.

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