Fabius I just read your part III, and while I concur with many of your points, I don’t necessarily concur with your conclusions. They are a bit premature for me at this point, but you could very well prove to be right. We are in agreement that our military doesn’t understand 4GW (and 5GW is emerging), and failed to adapt to it, though it has been prevalent since the end of WWII. GEN Shinseki’s philosophy probably accurately reflected the conventional army’s leadership’s, which was we could afford not win in a counterinsurgency, but we could not afford to lose a conventional fight. In many ways I think he is right, as I can’t recall any of our non-wins in the COIN realm doing irreparable damage to our national interests. There were set backs and pride issues, but still no other country was able to impose their will on ours through military force, or the threat of military force, because we had the best conventional force in the world. That is one reason I think he cautioned (along with GEN Powell) not to get involved in insurgencies unless absolutely necessary. He stated that the realm of counter terrorism belonged primarily to law enforcement, intelligence and special operations. The more I reflect on what he said the two times I heard him talk, the more I think he was one of our greatest leaders. Obviously his wisdom didn’t mesh well with the SECDEF.

A couple years back I read that that our current CoS of the Army, GEN Schoomaker commented that we somehow have became the British Redcoats. I can only assume he was making reference to our current crop of officers who blindly embrace doctrine, have alienated the local population with our conventional tactics, and have almost formed our Army into a caste system where we have developed an unfounded arrogance in our officer corps. A corps that simply out of touch with reality.

Our officers (young and old alike) seem incapable of disregarding the doctrines of the past, and cling to them like a low income worker would cling to a winning lottery ticket, with same results in the long run, a apparent quick victory, and then end up broke again.

I recall a young Army CPT, working in W. Point (the Kool-Aid factory), so this should be no surprise, writing that the terrorists didn’t know their own doctrine as well as we knew it. Please park the arrogance on the shelf and take another look.

We're slow to adapt, and dangerously so. We are now embracing an updated counterinsurgency manual that unfortunately is a few years too late for Iraq, because the conflict has morphed into a civil war like conflict similar to Bosnia and Kosovo. Once we figure that out and adapt, we'll be in another environment.

All that said, if we could get the right military leaders into Iraq, get Karl Rove out of the strategy business, and impose martial law (the current government probably needs to go), and change the ROE I think there still may be time to make something out of it, other than a complete loss.