Tyrt: I don't think SPC123 (who I would surmise is a non-com from his tag) was being arrogant. I think he was trying to tell me that he thought I was wrong based on his experience. His comments on my knowledge of how things are in the service was phrased a bit harshly, but he was right -- I really don't know much about how things are in the Army in the areas he addressed. I said I felt I had expressed myself badly because he obviously did not completely understand where I was coming from, and it's really my job to convey that, not his to decipher it. Compared to some of the responses I get, this one was quite respectful.

As for generals fighting the last war, read Kaplan's recent piece on how we don't have any troops to send to Afghanistan other than the ones we have in Iraq. The point he made was that for all the incredible amounts of money we spend on the military, WE CAN'T WIN WARS because we don't have enough troops to win them. How can that possibly be? Simple: our military leaders (and our civilian leaders as well) are still fighting the Cold War, focusing on hugely expensive weaponry/ships/planes while leaving us with not enough troops to conquer and hold a fourth-rate power like Iraq. Oh, we can bomb the shit out of anybody, but as the British in 1940 and the Vietnamese in the 1970s showed, bombing alone ain't enough.

One of the points I was trying to make in this post was the same general point Kaplan made, which is that the military in the field has shown flexibility in trying to adjust to what are obviously new realities in this war. Iraq was really lost by the civilians, not the military. But in the larger sense, the careerism and the kind of institutional thinking you refer to exists to such a degree in both civilian AND military minds that it was almost inevitable that once we ran into a war in which the enemy didn't fold up quickly, we would lose.