This thread refers to the article by William S Lind: An Officer Corps That Can’t Score

Lind's article has been discussed on many blogs and around here but with IMHO too much emotion where the 'messenger' is attacked rather than what he said being analysed to see if the cap fits. I suggest that Lind may well be lughing and saying 'I told you so' at the quality of the responses to his article from members of the US Officer Corps.

Perhaps in this thread contributors can attempt to analyse exactly what Lind said and agree or disagree in a constructive manner rather than with an emotional knee-jerk response? Here is my summary of what Lind stated:

Lind starts with listing the recent wars ‘lost’ by the US military – probably to draw the attention of the serving military. He stated that unlike after the defeat in Vietnam which:

…bred a generation of military reformers,’ … Today, the landscape is barren. Not a military voice is heard calling for thoughtful, substantive change. Just more money, please.
Then expanding:

Such a moral and intellectual collapse of the officer corps is one of the worst disasters that can afflict a military because it means it cannot adapt to new realities.
Lind explains why it is so as follows:

Why? … at the moral level—Colonel Boyd’s highest and most powerful level—our officers live in a bubble.

At Boyd’s next level, the mental, our officers are not professionals. … The vast majority of our officers read no serious military history or theory.
But officers are also victims:

Officers are also victims of three structural failures,…

The first, and possibly the worst, is an officer corps vastly too large for its organization—now augmented by an ant-army of contractors, most of whom are retired officers...

Command tours are too short to accomplish anything, Decisions are pulled up the chain because the chain is laden with surplus officers looking for something to do. Decisions are committee-consensus, lowest common denominator, ...
He continues:

The second and third structural failings are …They are the “up or out” promotion system and “all or nothing”

It is not difficult to see how these two structural failings in the officer corps morally emasculate our officers and all too often turn them, as they rise in rank and near the magic 20 years, into ass-kissing conformists.
He summarises:

Of these two types of failings, the structural are probably the most damaging. They are also the easiest to repair.

Fixing the substantive problems is harder because those fixes require changes in organizational culture.
He concludes:

If American military officers want to know, or even care, why we keep losing, they need only look in the mirror.
Does the cap fit?