Truth

Sorry for the rough language above, but Army Grunts tend to be like that.  I recall in ROTC we were taught that there were only three proper responses:  “Yes sir.  No sir.  No excuse sir.”  We were also told, accurately, that one bad fitness report would probably destroy our careers.  Such attitudes tended to produce officers who quickly realized that telling the higher ups only what they, and the civilian elected leadership, wanted to hear was the only path to a successful career.  Fighting iconoclastic generals from the past, like Patton, might be idolized in theory, but they were cautionary tales for climbing the ranks in practice.  Thus in Afghanistan we dumped untold sums on the Afghan military, a military that could not stand up to lightly armed tribesmen, where their pilots training in America would routinely desert and where members of the Afghan military regularly murdered our soldiers in so-called Blue on Blue attacks.  None of this was surprising to anyone paying attention after the first few years of attempts to produce an Afghan military that could fight the Taliban, but the tragic farce went on for twenty years, largely due to institutional mendacity that always preferred pleasant lies to grim reality.  This was a repetition of what was done with Vietnamization during the Vietnam War, although, to be fair, the worst of ARVN were the Prussian Guards compared to the Afghan military.   Policies based on lies will usually come a cropper, and institutions that foster lies will always be silently making steady progress to the next debacle of a defeat, no matter their technological prowess and the physical bravery of the troops.