Perhaps part of our current problem are our efforts to overly expand the "profession" of arms to all who bear arms in the defense of their country. Certainly this is not the historic approach in the U.S.

European "professionals" rightfully looked down upon American armies made up of armature citizen soldiers as lacking the doctrinal uniformity of training, dress, mannerisms and tactics found in their professional forces. We wore the fact of our military being made up of such armatures as a badge of honor, and similarly mocked them for their stilted, predictable, "professional" ways.

Too much of a good thing, however is a bad thing, so we created the military academies so as to always have a core of professionals to build our citizen armies around whenever the need for such a force drove its formation.

The current professional force, like the strategies of containment it was formed to implement, is as obsolete as the smooth bore musket. The challenge is to get senior leaders to embrace such thinking after the current model being "what right looks like" for three generations.

Americans like their army being a little rough around the edges, and they like it being something that good citizens form in times of need, and that melts back down to its professional core once that need is over. The irony is, that the "profession of arms" that prevents the formation of such a citizenry, is perhaps the group that grieves their fading from the American fabric the most.