Tanner Greer has started a series Learning from our Defeat which covers the US intervention in Afghanistan.

Greer leads with a comparison between the first and second Gulf Wars, where he sees the former as a huge success and the latter as a fiasco. This seems more a literary device than not, ie. were Greer poked, he would probably point out GW1's failed Kesselschlacht and then get into the whys and hows it fell apart.

Presumably he didn't do that because (a) it's then just not suprising that another later and larger action would have later and larger problems, and (b) a comparative study would tend to drag the perspective backwards through time to other priors, and it's nice to have a mythical Trojan War after which history can start.

On the other hand, protracted losses are essentially Augean stables run amok, where literally everyone and everything is covered in .... difficult to untangle. Starting with some easier-to-identify earlier failings, and looking for their re-occurrence would seem the easier approach.

Unless Greer knows that there are categorically new faults to be found.

Will this series get beyond just treating the symptoms, ie. fighting the last war? Time will tell....