While I am never adverse to self-reflection, and I think the Army has its share of issues in the personnel system, I cannot accept the basic premises of Lind’s argument. In the first line he says:

The most curious thing about our four defeats in Fourth Generation War—Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan—is the utter silence in the American officer corps.
OK, you have to accept that there is a thing called “Fourth Generation Warfare” and that all four of those campaigns are examples of it. Lebanon and Somalia were significantly different than Iraq and Afghanistan in that we (the U.S.) were not truly in charge of mission parameters. Further, where Somalia and Lebanon were peacekeeping/stability operations, Iraq and Afghanistan were more complex.

Next, there is no discussion of the how the nature of the mission affected our ability to perform. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, during “Phase III” or the actual ground war, we performed admirably. Fight and Win America’s wars, that’s what we do. What we never cracked the code on was COIN. I would argue that the failure there was largely the fault of the civilian politicians who created a mission that was beyond not only the capabilities of the military but also beyond any logical expectation of success. Assuming that is the case, we will gain nothing by trying to change something that may not be broke … or at least not broke for the reasons Lind cites.