"Wehrmacht penis envy"

[JasonC]

"unconventional battles have and always will be difficult to plan for, and "win" "

The US cut its teeth fighting and winning unconventional battles. Ask the Sioux, or ask a Philipino. It has triumphed in them pretty much every time, and only treason at home has ever got in the way - not enemy anything. In the field, it knows what to do, kicks ass and takes names.

Yes that includes holding out a viable political end state, it includes relentless will. It also includes a constant unassuming fairness by fighting men in the field and a brutally realistic attritionist perpective at the command level.

The US military tradition has very little to learn from the much less successful German one. Some stuff about staff professionalism and training to get it, and combined arms, much of which was already learned in WW II, sure.

But the modern maneuverist cult has been pretty much all bad, precisely because it has thrown away sound collective intelligence in the "American way of war", for a much less sound continental European tradition of flamboyant losing through reckless military gambling. Which always overpromises and undelivers, until the old truths of attrition warfighting force themselves back in.