I just finished reading "Blood Makes The Grass Grow", about a Norwegian soldier who decided to leave the Norwegian military to join the Kurds and fight ISIS on

I just finished reading "Blood Makes The Grass Grow", about a Norwegian soldier who decided to leave the Norwegian military to join the Kurds and fight ISIS on the ground because his skills weren't being put to use in the Norwegian military. In it, he talks about how the Norwegian brass painted him as a traitor and a war criminal, and shunned him from his old unit. Every Western military suffers from this. Every. Single. One. And the reason is Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: there are two kinds of people in bureaucracies: those who serve the bureaucracy's goals, and those who serve the bureaucracy; ultimately the organization is led by people who serve the bureaucracy rather than people who serve the bureaucracy's goals. It's simply unavoidable in a military which must necessarily be a large bureaucracy.