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There's definitely strong selection bias in effect. The people who aren't hardcore fans are almost certainly not paying money for access.
Funnily enough, I personally think that the war in Afghanistan wasn't violent enough. If you can't solve your problems through violence, you're not applying enough violence. The American brass thought you could win against an insurgency by being nice, and that never gets you anywhere I'm afraid.
Our understanding of insurgency is pretty developed at this point, and applying more violence is not the answer.
The problem in Afghanistan was lack of clarity from the very top about America's goals, which is why the military couldn't build a coherent insurgency or counter-insurgency plan. Instead they just applied violence to whoever happened to be looking funny at the US at any given moment. More of that would have been disastrous.
Uh, Hadrian wants a word.
Somehow I doubt the "understanding of insurgency" that you imagine exists actually works in any real sense. More violence or no violence are the only two answers.
How much of modern "theory of war" (for want of a better term) ever gets empirically confirmed or rejected by military practice? I used to assume the sort of people who wrote for Foreign Policy/Foreign Affairs knew what they were talking about, but after browsing /r/geopolitics over the past two years and constantly seeing similar headlines from those sorts of sources that always end up proving laughably wrong I'm beginning to wonder how much insight these people really have.
It's all officers, who by definition are not soldiers and know fuck and shit about fighting all making up theories about how soldiers fight. They quite literally know nothing. They're vaguely aware that they're in charge of fighting, and a good officer might even know which sergeant he needs to tell to go fight, but they know as much about the process as a big city mayor knows about trash collection.
Very nearly 100% of all military analysis, history and theory has been catalogued and written by people who have never even seen a gunfight firsthand, much less kicked a door. Interesting so far as it goes, but to use any of it as a practical manual is ridiculous.
Do you have any idea why we still have this system where our officers (mostly, with commissioning-program exceptions) don't start as soldiers? It feels like an outdated relic of "aristocrats get to be officers, commoners just get to be enlisted" days that are now centuries past. I could imagine a system of "try to pick out your smartest recruits, and put them in charge of the others when they've had enough study and experience", but the attitude "put them in charge when they've had enough study; what good is experience?" is baffling to me. It seems like the system depends in part on at least some of the smartest recruits getting missed by or rejecting it. That happens (one of the smartest kids I knew went enlisted Air Force, and I had a friend decide "Chemical engineering has been so stultifying, I'd rather be marching on Baghdad"), but it seems dangerous to rely on.
It's not like the system has just been unaware of the importance of its NCOs, either. Supposedly one of the Army OCS test questions from ~1950 was "You are in charge of a detail of 11 men and a sergeant. There is a 25-foot flagpole lying on the sandy, brush-covered ground. You are to erect the pole. What is your first order?", to which the answer was of course "Sergeant, erect that flagpole."
Every society in history has had this distinction, it's necessary to have sufficient elite buy-in to the military to not get conquered by steppe nomads. It's dumb but it's necessary. Elites aren't going to march around under full pack and get shot at- and they won't send their sons to do it either. Flying a jet over camel jockeys with no anti-air capability, or bossing the real soldiers around? That's a convenient prep for high-status civilian roles. Serving in the infantry or driving a tank or whatever are not.
How necessary is elite buy-in for modern first world militaries? Are there not enough soldiers that the best can be selected and promoted into officer roles?
It just seems bizarre to me that you can have people making on-the-ground military decisions who have no actual fighting experience.
Very. Militaries neglected by their civilian elites tend to underperform, as it turns out you can't shoot budget cuts.
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