It is extremely obvious that soldiers were unprepared for the Afganistan campaign. No military had trained for insurgency missions before but were used to conventional, cold war threat.
really only once before has an insurgency in modern setting been quelled with relative success, and that was by the British in Malaysia. This did cost extreme amount of money and took them decades to achieve with an impossibly rigorous program. We are talking about the disaster that was the Afghanistan campaign and people blame the military, which is hardly fair. It takes more than 14 years to rebuild an entire country.
Also, Karth, the fact that soldiers didn't know what they were doing in Afghanistan is a systematic problem that is frequent in the U.S. military. The military leadership never seems to be willling to tell their soliders what they're there to do and why they should do it. It is a doctrine problem that enlisted men don't get shared the details of their mission because officers are unwilling to have to explain to their subordinates what it is they're actually fucking doing. the term "theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die" is way too prevelant in the U.S. MIlitary
