I can see your point, but disagree with it. I would say that, as the article also asserts, it is the job of generals to adapt to new kinds of warfare. Saying th

I can see your point, but disagree with it. I would say that, as the article also asserts, it is the job of generals to adapt to new kinds of warfare. Saying that these are not "real wars" or "conventional wars" is pointless. In the end the generals have to be able to lead the military in whatever situation the political leaders and the global geopolitics put them in. The US military is facing these kinds of insurgencies, because the enemy has adapted it's strategy: The Taliban are not stupid enough to engage the US in full on frontal assaults, because they'd lose. Assuming that generals would only have to face a specific kind of conflict ("conventional" warfare) is a losing proposition. In fact, if you examine conventional wars more closely, you'll find that the way these have been fought has changed drastically from one to the next, and a military leadership that is not able to adapt to new kinds of war has a huge drawback. (For example, WWI was a trench war, a few years later, in WWII the method of warfare has completely changed, towards fast tank assaults and air raids. During the cold war area, a large scale tank battle in Europe was still a realistic threat, nowadays it's unthinkable. During the later part of the 20th century the US has had great success by relying on an almost invincible air force to exhaustively bomb the enemy before sending in any troops, ...). As the main task of the US military nowadays seems to be less in territorial defense and more in engaging in "messy" wars similar to Afghanistan and Iraq, I think the leadership needs to adapt accordingly instead of waiting for the next war that fits their preconceived notion of what a war should be.