quote:

The State Department’s failure to effectively staff and run interventions requiring close civil-military cooperation in the field has a long history. Four critical lessons can be drawn from the post-9/11 experience.

quote:

Tour Lengths: Undermining Effectiveness

The problems of tour lengths bedeviled both the military and the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. I arrived in Afghanistan in the summer of 2005. Within months, most of the U.S. Embassy Kabul staff had turned over: It was the equivalent of an institutional frontal lobotomy that was repeated yearly.