AMERICA'S BEST LEADERS ISSUE: "U.S. Junior Officers (Military): A Wisdom Forged by War," by Anna Mulrine, U.S. News & World Report, 8 December 2008.

The real story of America finally conquering its Vietnam story is told not merely at the Mattis-Petraeus level, as I once did in Esquire. Rather, it's best told at the level of junior officers. That's where the biggest learning has occurred and that's where the change in tactics has been led. When Ambrose wrote "Band of Brothers," his big uncertainty was the question, Could average American civilians be turned into a fighting force capable of taking on the most powerful military in the world? If I were to describe a similar uncertainty in the GWOT, it wouldn't be about a casualty-averse America or an attention-deficit America so much as whether or not our Army and Marine Corps could truly become learning organizations and adapt themselves to new wars for which they were not trained nor supplied. And the answer has been yes, primarily because our junior officers demanded it and then carried it out when the leadership emerged above to provide bureaucratic top-cover (my "Monks of War"). This is the true conquering of the Vietnam syndrome, and it took a new generation of young officers to pull it off. This is the essential plot-line of the security chapter in Great Powers:

THE UNDENIABLE TRAJECTORY: The Miseducation of Colin Powell
THE AMERICAN SYSTEM PERTURBED: The Lost Year in Iraq
THE NEW RULES: From "The Monks of War," A New COIN of the Realm THE NEW NORMAL: The Long (Post)War
THE GLOBAL ACCELERANT: The Privatization of American Foreign Policy
THE INESCAPABLE REALIGNMENT: The Reblending of Diplomacy, Defense and Development
THE BETTER NORMAL: The Command-After-Next

You start with a Colin Powell and his doctrine of avoiding nation-building at all cost and you end with the creation of Africa Command, an entire combatant command devoted to the same. That is an amazing trajectory.