The US military came in for sharp criticism on Friday by one of its own.
Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling said that generals had failed to prepare the military for counter-insurgency warfare, kept silent when the country went to war with too few troops, and botched the post-invasion occupation.
"In 2007, Iraq's grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war," Yingling wrote in an essay published in the Armed Forces Journal.
"These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America's general officer corps," he wrote.
The deputy commander of the army's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, Yingling has served two combat tours in Iraq, and before that tours in Bosnia and the 1991 Gulf War.
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