Kind... of. Both won by having enormously higher stakes and will to fight. Plus a ton of foreign aid. And neighboring friendly or at least too-disorganized-to-

Kind... of. Both won by having enormously higher stakes and will to fight. Plus a ton of foreign aid. And neighboring friendly or at least too-disorganized-to-resist countries the US was reluctant (but not always wholly unwilling) to engage. Both got badly stomped on a sheer damage-and-casualties-inflicted front, but didn't give up and had relatively safe space to retreat into and carry on logistics through (and foreign aid) that kept them from being counted out no matter how many times we punched them. But they were getting punched a lot, and hard, and weren't landing a ton of blows in return. If one expects to be on the historical US side of an encounter like that, it's not clear to me that shifting to less-educated troops is going to help. The current approach kicks absolute ass—from a sheer military perspective. Especially against non-modern militaries (and there are very few fully modern ones—the training and equipment requirements to field a modern army are immense, expensive, and require a level of delegation of power that many kinds of states can't securely achieve). Uneducated farmers may have won those fights (while doing a hell of a lot of dying, and delivering rather poor damage in return) but I don't think it follows that the US military would be well-served by poorly-educated soldiers.