After the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army soberly examined where it had fallen short. That critical appraisal laid the groundwork for the military's extraordinary rebuilding in the 1970s and 1980s.
Today, after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, no such intensive reviews are under way, at least to my knowledge — and I have been covering the U.S. military for 22 years. The problem is not that our nation is no longer capable of such introspection. There has been much soul-searching in the United States about the financial crisis of 2008 and how to prevent a recurrence. Congress conducted studies and introduced broad legislation to reform financial regulations.
But no parallel work has been done to help our military. The one insider work that tried to critique overall military performance was a respectable study by the Joint Staff, but it fell short in several key respects, including silence about the failure to deploy enough troops to carry out the assigned missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. As James Dobbins recently noted in a review of that study, our military shows "a continued inability to come to closure" on some controversial issues.