"No good officer lies on purpose. But all too many of our serving officers repeat falsehoods without giving serious thought to what they're saying. ... In an age that demands fierce intellectual rigor or those who lead young Americans into battle, our military's weakest link may be its increasing tendency--mirroring our society--to substitute sound bites and slogans for stern analysis. ... Consider just a few of the war-pop mantras infecting the speech of four-star generals and well-meaning junior officers: 'We can't kill our way out of this conflict.' Applied to Iraq or Afghanistan, that's political correctness run amok. ... Over the past 3,000 years, insurgencies overwhelmingly failed--because counterinsurgents killed them. ... 'Counterinsurgency is graduate-level warfare.' Was D-Day kindergarten? How about the campaign in the Southwest Pacific? ... A full-blown conventional war with a major power remains immeasurably more complex and dangerous than playing tag with terrorists. ... Our troops are victims of ambitious officers who went to ticket-punch grad schools and based their theses on examples cherry-picked from limited historical knowledge", original italics, my emphasis, Raph Peters at Armchair General, September 2009.
Quoted without comment.
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