Posted by Surferbeetle,

Some of your comments had no context, so I didn't understand what you were implying, but comments on a couple.

Iraq - Saddam, his sons, and many of his gang no longer walk the earth....blood has been spilled to atone for what was taken from us. Oil production is back up to what it was before Saddam took power ~ 3 million bbl/day. Internet penetration has gone from something close to zero to what appeared to be more than 50% in urban areas by my observation.
Saddam and his sons are dead, and good on us, but killing them did not require a major occupation, an excessive de-bathification program, and a largely failed nation building effort. Once Saddam was dead and the sanctions lifted I believe the Iraqis would have gotten their oil production back up to pre-Saddam years on their own (Western corporations would be allowed to provide technical expertise). The 50% internet penetration in itself is not a positive if 50% of them are using it to inform their views from disinformation on radical websites promoting ethnic hatred. That probably isn't happening, but still referring to internet penetration as a positive without understanding its impact seems a bit of reach. However, despite our win and we did win, we pushed Iraq into, or much closer to, Iran's sphere of influence, and ethnic violence is still very active, and the risk of civil war has not been erased. We won, but what the results of that win is too early to assess.

Iran - The economy is in shambles. The Syrian connection/pass thru supply route is fractured. Velayat-e faqih has a viable competitor in Najaf. Saudi Arabia & GCC, Turkey and Israel circle, scheme, and smell weakness...
Is an Iranian economy in shambles really in our long term interest? We did the same to Iraq, and when we removed Saddam we had to deal with that economic shamble in addition to an insurgency, a civil war, and transnational terrorism. It was assessed by some experts that weaker economy actually made Saddam more powerful. It seems feasible that a country with a strong and diversified economy would be more difficult for the government to control, because government handouts would be less valuable as a tool to control the masses.

Arab Spring - The world's largest youth bulge has a better chance to find employment and apply it's energy to productive efforts than previously.
This will be true only if they liberalize and allow their human capital to increase. If the result of Arab Spring is Sharia law and more oppression then I think we and they will all be greatly disappointed.

US Army - Many of the weak remaining from the '92 purge have been run off. The SOF model is validated and has earned resourcing...GPF will be cut; unless the 2 trillion mentioned in the campaign is needed to bring a proud and headstrong country to heel (the 12th Iman will not get his chance to come home for a while yet)...and if so GPF will gain a reprieve for a time.
In your opinion what is the SOF model? I think the GPF still has many weak senior leaders who are failing to adapt, and can't think beyond the bounds of outdated doctrine (to include our COIN doctrine). As for the SOF model, we have "a" CT model, but is it the best model possible? We also have a Cold War UW/FID model that we try to apply to every security problem. My point is I hope we don't have a SOF model, but rather an adaptive SOF that constantly evolves and unlike GPF isn't constrained by doctrine.