Any armed force will have difficulty fostering innovation. It's an organic problem. An army requires discipline; discipline means executing orders without question; executing orders without question is done best by people who aren't given to reflection and the pondering of alternatives. Thus those who are not given to challenging the ideas held by those above them tend to rise to the top, and those who are, don't.

In this regard, it doesn't particularly surprise me that Kaplan has had to revise his opinion. The times when an army does creative thinking best is when it's old ideas come up short. The army knew exactly how to conquer Iraq when Saddam was running it, but was unable to pacify it thereafter. Once it became clear that the civilian leadership wasn't going to provide it with enough troops to police Iraq as it policed Germany and Japan after WWII, the Army was left with a mission which it couldn't perform without a radical shift in its thinking. Petraeus and Yingling are examples of men who went outside the box to solve a problem.

Without success, most likely, because Iraq remains unpacified to the extent that the gains recorded during the surge have not, as was hoped at the outset, shown themselves able to survive the end of the surge. At least that's what Petraeus told Congress -- the "pause" in troop withdrawals is an admission that the purpose of the surge, which was to permit more troops to be withdrawn, has not been achieved.

But in THIS war, at any rate, one cannot blame the military for the failure of the mission. That blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the Tax Cut Traitors, who refused to increase the level of troops to the point necessary because it would have unbalanced the budget to the point where the Bush tax cuts would have had to go.

We were told, after 9/11, that we were in a "war for civilization." And then the wealthiest Americans simply refused, and continue to refuse, to finance that war, demanding instead that their tax burden be LIGHTENED. In the face of this betrayal, the military has done what it could to make lemonade out of lemons, but some missions cannot be accomplished.