If We Don't Know What We Are Doing.....

The US is not really a nation in many senses and our so called military reflects that. Who makes our military policies and carries out our military goals. We have the president as the commander in chief, who has to have the advice and consent of the senate in foreign treaties etc and can not declare war and a house of reps that have total control in theory of all spending. Then you have a secretary of defense over the 3 branches selected by the president. Then you have 3 services, us army, air force, navy and marines, and all branches have competing goals and are always trying to both maintain and expand their power base. Best example is air craft, the army can not have large fixed wing aircraft and the air force is not really enthused in furnishing either tank destroying or air drop air craft. Thus the C130 and the Warthog, both 30 plus years old and no real replacement for the decades old designs of the helicopters.
The air force has bombers, ICBM, cruise missiles etc and the navy does and sub launched versions of the ICBM and cruise missiles as well. we spend billions on competing projects and overlapping designs and when we try to make one size fit all, it usually fails in a grand way. Then we have the lobbyist and congress critters protecting their turfs and forcing through projects that weren't usable when proposed and are even less so when half the promised features are delivered 10 years late and at 4 times the cost. Then to add insult to injury, the powers that be, are always planing to refight the last great war and thus we haven't really won a war since WWII, and probably couldn't win that if forced to replay it. As for the individual soldier, we have some of the best trained, best equipped most highly motivated soldiers in our countries history, but our track record of using them in the last 70 years has been dismal to say the least. We can destroy any target and win any battle, but we have lost every war and that is a command and control function, not an individual soldier function. But in this forum as so many other subjects, discussing the problems, is preaching to the choir.