[EliRivers]

If it's anything like UK Forces, it's not so much the leaders wanting to look better on paper as the powers that be simply always ratcheting the tempo up, and conversely training, maintenance, downtime, personnel numbers and budgets down.

Senior military officers self-select for being the kind of people who say they can do it. The system deselects people who say it can't be done.

Keep going and going until disaster hits to make everything reset; traditionally, a big war does this. At that point, people do start saying when things can't be done and it gets very hard to sweep failure under the rug when it involves being occupied by foreign powers and people's children never coming home.