COD should have its cadence in elementary arabic or farsi. Every soldier should know 500 emergency words in both. Every soldier should learn how to sit sharpsooter still for six hours before shooting a target. Every soldier should compete on watching video monitors from stationary or moving/robotic monitors for suspicious activity. Those are good drills.

Every command should trade in every single piece of ornamental stuff, band instruments, budget for drill, and spend the money on the best protection from mines or ambushes, or top equiment in non-painful lie detectors, thermal scans, MRI machines, voice stress. Every Iraqi neighborhood should expect 5% of its people to be rounded up every day, and given simple lie detector tests - one question - which of your neighbors is an insurgent. Then release them, round up the insurgents, send them to (Greenland, Alaska, the Falklands) someplace cold and wet, and give them jobs.

That is what I would do if I were in Iraq.