I only spent 5 years as a Marine officer...

...but yeah, this sounds about right.

Fred Reed "Not Today, Sir."

...Recently I talked by email about the war with Jim Coyne, an airborne-infantry friend who served two tours as a gunship door-gunner in Viet Nam and then made a career in journalism. I asked, “Do they [I meant the officer corps, the official military] actually believe the optimistic twaddle this time around? Do they really not know what is happening?”

Jim’s response: “In my opinion, they really don't know; they may not even want to know on some level. You know as well as I, these are mission-oriented folks; can do folks; failure and its introspective handmaidens are not options to them. And in a tactical mission-oriented world our military doesn't really fail very often; in a strategic military/political world such as the Mideast and Iraq, however, we simply cannot win.

”Again, as in Viet Nam, the career officer corps salutes and marches toward the sound of battle. Eventually however (and it won't be long now) it's the grunts who will begin to revolt, first in small ways (as in the 101st in late 1968, "No sir. We are not going up that hill again.) and then, quickly thereafter (As in 1973, "Fuck you, asshole.") By that time the media may get wind of things and spin it exponentially out of control. That’s what I think.”

...The pattern is so common in recent wars as to be routine. The enlisted men know that the US is losing. The officers do not know it, or refuse to know it. This will eventually have consequences.

When men die pointlessly in a war they know cannot be won and that means nothing to them, when they realize that they are dying for the egos of draft-dodging politicians safe in Washington—they will revolt. It happened before. It will happen again. But when? Next year, I'd guess.

It is important to understand that officers and enlisted men are very different animals. For example, enlisted men do things (drive the tank, repair the helicopter) whereas officers are chiefly administrators. But the important difference is psychological. Enlisted men are blue-collar guys or technicians. They carry little ideological overburden. They want to fix the tank or finish the field exercise and then go drink beer and get laid.

Above all, they are realists. If the new radio doesn’t work, or Baghdad turns out to be a tactically irresolvable nightmare, the enlisted guys feel very little urge to pretend otherwise. This is why officers do not like reporters to be alone with the troops. And they seriously don’t.

...officers can’t conclude anything but the positive. There are several reasons. Career officers, first, are politicians. You don’t get promoted by saying that the higher-ups are otherworldly incompetents. An officer’s loyalty is to his career, and to the officer corps, not to the country or to his troops. If this sounds harsh, note how seldom an active-duty officer will criticize policy, yet when he retires he may suddenly discover that said policy resulted in unnecessary deaths among the troops. Oh? Then why didn’t he say so when it would have saved lives?

There is a curious moral cowardice among officers. They will fly dangerous missions over Baghdad, but they won’t say that things aren’t going well. They don’t go against their herd.

Further, and I want to say this carefully, officers often are not quite adults. They can be (and usually are) smart, competent, dedicated, and physically brave, and some are exceedingly hard men. But there is a simple-mindedness about them, an aversion to the handmaidens of introspection, a certain boyishness as in kids playing soldier. A lot of make-believe goes into an officer’s world. Enlisted men, grown up, see things as they are. Officers are issued a world by the command and then live in it.

Note the heavy emphasis of the military, meaning the officer corps, on ritual and pageantry. It is adult kid-stuff. Three thousand men building a skyscraper just show up, do their jobs, and go home. The military wants its men standing in squares, precisely at attention, thumbs along the seams, with brass perfectly polished. It wants stirring music, snappy salutes, and the haunting tones of taps, “Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full, sir.” This is justified as necessary for discipline. It isn’t. A gunny sergeant has no difficulty maintaining his authority without the hoop-la.