JMM: Unless you're going to play Genghis Khan, in any COIN situation, you either kill them all -- thus win a 'victory,' I guess -- or, if you aren't going to kill them all for whatever reason, you're going to come to a point of mutual agreement -- thus less than a 'victory.' You cannot win a COIN campaign, you can only achieve an acceptable outcome. Hopefully...

In the words of helogrunt, killing AQ and the Taliban leadeship will not accomplish the goal which is, as I understand it, to deny in some way future use of Afghanistan for the training or launching of terrorists. Even if you could do that -- which I doubt, the smart ones will just go to ground and wait until you leave -- you still wouldn't achieve a victory. They've got a personnel replacement system as good or better than ours. Probably better. So many are...

Schmedlap: Yeah, that's the theory but in practice, all those Generalists reveal their backgrounds. Heavy guys like mass, Artillery guys like precision and rapid response (accuracy comes in a distant third), Aviators like checklists, the Light guys tend to be dazzled by their own tactical prowess, SF guys will drink a lot of Chai, SOF-DA guys will kill you if you offer them tea and so on. There was also a major difference in approach and tolerance for error between Officers with the same generic background but assigned to what used to be Functional Areas 41 and 53 back in pre-historic times...

Problem is aside from the genes, we're all products of our environment and old habits die hard. Take Sanchez (please...). He was a tanker, an unusually cautious one with (bad IMO) experience in Bosnia -- this is the guy after all that took a week to get a bridge across a River; that appeared in Bosnia where the 82d had SSGs out playing Mayor and immediately upon arrival announced everyone would pull out of the villages and fortify in base camps (sound familiar...) and every patrol would have a Field Grade Officer accompany it. Sheer idiocy. If there was anyone who should not have been in charge in Baghdad, he was the poster boy.

Having been in Airborne units with Mech experienced Cdrs and in Mech units with Light or Airborne experienced Cdrs, they are definitely different skill sets. In all cases, the folks cited performed adequately but only one crossover performed well IMO. On a far lower but pertinent level, do9ing away with the 11M MOS was not smart.

The Generalist myth is caused by the harsh fact that our thoughtful Congress has decreed that we must be fair in promotions and assignments. Which means the Army has no choice but to assume that all folks of equal rank are equally qualified. They aren't and even if they were, personality and experience differences would still mean uneven performance. What that also means is that the Army is forced to place square pegs in round holes -- and as I've said before, you can do that -- but the peg is too small to fill the hole.