My last on the interview...which you really do need to read to get a sensing of where the AFJ article comes from as in this:

PY: The thing the Army institutionally is still struggling to learn is that the most important thing we do in counterinsurgency is building host nation institutions – building security forces, building local government capacity – and yet all our organizations are designed around the least important line of operations: combat operations. There is a real danger in over-determination based on the organization’s design. There’s the old saying, “If you give a man a hammer, he sees every problem as a nail.” Similarly, if you give a unit tanks and Bradleys, they see every problem as a movement to contact. That’s an oversimplification, but it is a problem. I’ve now had two combat tours where I was involved in developing ISF and I’ve been to every Army school you can go to as an officer, and no one has ever talked to me about that challenge. No one has ever given me any classes on how to do that. Thankfully there are a lot of great Elizabeth Hellers (ph) out there and other smart people who are just figuring things out because there are problems and they just have to be solved. The institutional Army, though, has not caught up in either professional education or organizational design with the challenges of counterinsurgency. So as I go into battalion command, I’m going to focus my troops on those tasks and give them the mental models that will allow them to anticipate those problems and solve them. Eventually the institutional Army will catch up and they’ll get that stuff into schools and there will be MTOE positions for security force development and civil-military operations; but until that day I think individual commanders will have to solve that problem on their own, because when we get into theater we certainly have to solve it. Waiting until we get there to understand that those are the problems we have to solve creates a lot of heartache. Our task as senior leaders is to anticipate those challenges and train for them before we have to go fight. That’s my big takeaway on the US side. On the Iraqi side, there’s just no substitute for having great Iraqi leaders whom we were just lucky enough to have. In Malaya the British said, “First you need a man, then you need a plan.” Well, Mayor Najim and Major General Khorsheed were the men and the plan was clear-hold-build, and certainly the most important part of that was the men. We could have done everything exactly as we had done it, but without those two the results would have been very different. In that sense, we were very grateful for their leadership and that was probably the most important part of all this.