Born on State Highway 1

Lt. Col. Paul Yingling has written a scathing assessment of US generals’ failure to anticipate, respond to, and report to the public the extent of the Iraqi insurgency.

For reasons that are not yet clear, America’s general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq’s government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq. Moreover, America’s generals have not explained clearly the larger strategic risks of committing so large a portion of the nation’s deployable land power to a single theater of operations.

He’s not interested, or it is outside the scope of his article, in whether or not the US should be there in the first place, but limits his criticism to the failure of the US military once involved. Still, an interesting read.