[handrous]

Modern companies are intensive responsibility-laundering engines. It's practically their primary function. That's always been a little true, but it's gotten a lot worse (at least in the US). It's a bunch of box-ticking so you can say "look, I did something!" if anything goes wrong—some of which box-ticking may require creating and hiring for new roles—and it's a downright miracle if the box-ticking activity provides any amount of useful value to anyone, aside from its value for responsibility-deflection.

IIRC, NPR ran a piece some years back covering how something similar happened to US military command (and, relatedly, its relationship to civilian oversight), some time between WWII and Vietnam, getting worse over time after that. Which, if that was accurate, is... worrisome. But that explains how you get a directionless and constantly-failing war in Afghanistan for nearly two decades, with non-stop reports of "yep, we accomplished the mission!" from every local command at the end of every deployment, and everyone in the command hierarchy just pretends everything's fine even though they know it isn't, and they are all allowed to do that with no consequences. Gotta evade, and launder, responsibility. That's job number one. Everything else is just a nice-to-have.

[ghostbrainalpha]

That's a great comment, but I disagree that the trend is ...worrisome.

The purpose of the military is to fight. And in the local sense, it is only increasing in effectiveness at its primary task.

But the primary task of a 20 year "war", is not fighting. It is the building a nation state.

That is something the military is not designed to do. It's absolutely insane we didn't have an entirely different branch of government whose job was to build a lasting system of compromises and coordination between local people. Even if the military did have that skillset and training, which they don't, the resentment from the local populace against the group of people they just fought against would be enough to compromise any mission.

It's like if we asked the same police officer to arrest a drug addict, then be the judge in the case, then be their parole officer, and finally help them find a job after their time served. It's a nice idea in a Utopian kind of way, but there are so many opportunities along that chain for the relationship to sour.

[handrous]

Oh, sure, the "winability" of what they were asked to do is also a problem. Lots of things were wrong with the entire enterprise, only one of which was the military's comfort with their own entire reporting structure openly lying constantly for years on end.

[_trampeltier]

Just like ask to a service to protect the people from IT attacks and at the same the same service like to have backdoors to everybodys phones, cameras, alexas and computers.

[mprovost]

Robert McNamara was secretary of defense for JFK and LBJ during the Vietnam War. Before that he was the president of Ford Motor Company. He's the one who introduced the charts that they used to show on TV with the number of enemy killed, clearly showing that the US was winning since the graphs always went up and to the right.

[Spooky23]

He was fighting the last war. The practice of killing everyone was a successful strategy that won WW2 in the Pacific.

Vietnam wasn’t the type of war that was supposed to happen — the real action was in Europe before we nuked each other.