Operation: FAIL

This sort of thing is why we fail.And the Brits are usually better at this than we are.

I love the U.S. Army, but my experience over 22 years of service was that we really hated to have to learn hard lessons drawn from failure. Field problems were seldom, if ever, "free play", which would have allowed tactically shrewd officers to make fools of tactically incompetent ones. Even when they were - as was my ARNG brigade's deployment to JRTC in 2005 - the incapable officers or NCOs are seldom relieved, seldom even retrained or counseled. The caissons just keep rolling along.We are engaged in a soon-to-be decades long foolish attempt to hustle the East. It has gained us little and, though costing us little as well, has gone a long way to keeping our eye off the geopolitical ball (why do we hear so little about the dangerously-close-to-collapse condition of Mexico, for example, other than in the paranoid screeds of the Arizona Republican Party?) as well as earning us a fair degree of enmity in a part of the world where we really have no reason NOT to be an honest broker.

At any rate, one would hope that at the very least what we could get out of this mobile clusterfuck would be a good after-action report/lessons learned assessment of how we managed to copulate this rottweiler. But no. Afraid that a report detailing the hubris, stupidity, venality and incompetence of the "leadership" of their country the British have chosen to hide these scumbags' moronity under the Cone of Silence. One is left to marvel about the depths of idiocy that the report must have detailed.

And for all that, we here in the U.S. have not even attempted such a self-examination. How much worse must our fucktardry have been that we dare not even begin to examine it?Sigh. It's like we're fucking half of a Bourbon. We forget nothing because we don't even try to learn anything.