"Yingling knows and apparently ignores that our military trains for both unconventional and conventional warfare. He now appears to enjoy unimpaired hindsight and preaches the merits of counterinsurgency as though he experienced a bolt of bright light from the heavens on the road to Damascus. The reality is that before the war, the services operated as we do now, in a resource-constrained world that forces each to make difficult strategic choices about the scope and types of training they undertake. The Army balances our mix of conventional and unconventional training based on consideration of frequent threat assessments and the limitations of our resources. Before Sept. 11, our leadership was rightly focused on the most likely national threats and the difficult task of positioning our forces to counter them. The slowness with which we transitioned to the unconventional environment we now find ourselves in is purely the result of having to shift operational gears in the middle of a fight."
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