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I've long argued that there should be a test for any officer who wants to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan - just one question: "Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?" If you answer "yes," you can go to Germany, South Korea or Japan, but not to Iraq or Afghanistan. Well, this war has produced a class of officers who are very out-of-the-box thinkers. They learned everything the hard way - not in classes at Annapolis or West Point, but on the streets of Fallujah and Kandahar. I call them: "The Class Too Dumb to Quit." I say that with affection and respect. When all seemed lost in Iraq, they were just too stubborn to quit and figured out a new anti-insurgency strategy. It has not produced irreversible success yet - and may never. But it has kept the hope of a decent outcome alive. The same people are now trying to do the same thing in Afghanistan. Their biggest strategic insight? "We don't count enemy killed in action anymore," one of their officers told me.

The problem, besides the disrespect to our soldiers is the clear imbecility of this person. The shortest distance between two points may well be a line in artificial Euclidean Geometry, but on a sphere the shortest distance is a curve that moves towards the poles. Thus, instead of demonstrating the intelligence of the students that he would send to Germany, Japan and Korea, he is sending dumb asses, while sending the ones that are truly intelligent (if they can explain why a line is the wrong answer) to Iran and Afghanistan.

Furthermore, he is demonstrating a clear lack of knowledge of the military. Endurance is a trait that the military believes makes for good leaders. Endurance is the coin that allows men to survive being far away from their friends and neighbors for long stretches at a time. To say, that they are too dumb to quite is an insult to them. They are too tough to quit, would be a more accurate description, or have too much perseverance to quit.