Concur. Folks seem to forget that we did have a fair amount of success training Montagnard elements in Vietnam once we focused on basic skills. If Americans have a failing (and it's not genetic...it's more cultural) it's trying to do too much too soon. You can even find examples of this historically within our own training efforts (the Civil War springs to mind).
I'd also argue that we were successful in training activities in Central America during the 1920s. Granted, we were propping up some questionable regimes, but the training seemed to work well enough.
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