Author Robert Kaplan once shared with me what he believes is the military's greatest weakness: “The general officer corps is sometimes asked to be strategic and understand the world beyond their capability. They are creatures of systems and lack the imagination to truly understand the world.” To the credit of those senior-most leaders, our noncommissioned officer corps is among the best in history. Corporals, sergeants and petty officers have led, bled and persevered time and again, deploying relentlessly to combat zones around the world. Officers deserve credit for promoting the best junior enlisted leaders and extending the trust necessary for intrepid, twentysomething-year-olds to lead squads and teams into harm’s way. In “small wars” such as Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly all the glory belongs to these “small unit” leaders. But their senior officers failed to see through the mystery and marketing, to stop deceiving themselves about effects achieved on backwater battlefields, to stop talking about the number of patrols conducted or IEDs found or raids performed and to ask inconvenient questions about whether it mattered. For years, countless military officers advised that one more year, one more operation, one more raid could be the turning point, redeeming the sacrifices made by thousands of young Americans and their Afghan partners. One lesson of our recent small wars is that all civilians—members of Congress, journalists and everyday Americans, too—ought to tighten the reins.
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