As one who has been all three -- SF, Inf Recon and Cav -- I wholeheartedly agree with what you say. The SF intrusion into the reconnaissance and surveillance business was all about funding and mission turf expansion (and it hit at a low point in the fortunes of the US Army when McNamara's project 100,000 was in full bloom and training was being dumbed down). Spaces and budget slices.
The Inf problem is partly that too many Inf Cdrs do not have a clue how to use their Recon capability and our 1980-2005 poor, dumbed-down training didn't help-- Armor branch is taking advantage of that to garner spaces...
The Cav problem is that they lost the bubble on Reconnaissance and became an 'economy of force' element and due to bad equipping decisions (and the aforementioned poor training system), Armor heavy and 'Hi diddle diddle right down' the middle oriented.
Much of our problem with recon is impatience -- some staff squirrel is afraid his Boss will ask a question he cannot answer so they drive their Recon elements into dumb situations and thus the perception that Recon is (a) too slow and (b) too dangerous to employ properly is thoroughly embedded in the heads of too many.
There are some exceptions to all the above but they are far too few.
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