Tom, a question. When you say "senior leaders," who do you mean, exactly? The reason I ask is that one of the "stories" we civvies hear in some of the media is that (to some extent) the senior civilian leadership took a long time to decide that an active COIN approach was necessary. In this "narrative" of recent events, civilian leadership putting Petraeus in charge allowed your platoon and company leaders to really do what they knew needed doing a long time ago--not simply to the extent they could on their own initiative, but in an integrated and whole-hearted way, which is (probably) a lot more effective overall. But this narrative also lets senior military leadership "off the hook" so to speak: It places the blame with the secretary of defense and the rest of the administration.
I am sure that as with most things, it is a mixture of the two so don't exclude the middle if that is the right answer. Anyway I am curious how y'all see this.
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