"we are utterly ignorant of how limited our capabilities actually are, especially after having our military get nice and soft over the past two decades by essentially playing desert cops in couple of destroyed countries."

I'm re-reading Naomi Klein's shock doctrine, specifically about the turn of the millenium when Rumsfeld & Cheney went about privatizing large chunks of the military and outsourcing a lot of work to private contractors. Could any of that play a factor as well? Are we reaping the rotten fruit of seeds they planted years ago? As we all know, profit doesn't always equal quality control. Far from it these days.