Train the way you mean to fight... Fight the way you were trained.
A key piece of information I didn’t see was; who were the “enemy combatants” portrayed as? Middle easterners? Urban youths? Rural Rednecks? Hmmmm?
In this case it seems like they’ll be fighting Americans.
What Good Can a Handgun Do Against An Army?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/2312894/posts
Seems like they need to work on their tactics. Have a firefight with two guys, only one of which apparently has a pistol. Let one of them get away. Even though reportedly you have cell phone tracking data to follow the guys in their vehicle.
Then shut down an entire city, and mobilize perhaps 1000 or more LEOs from all over the area, plus helicopters, etc. to try to find a wounded, unarmed, teenager. Spend an entire day looking, raiding houses with teams of 20 LEOs in full SWAT mode, but forget to just look around the neighborhood.
Spend a lot of time securing a press conference area with EOD teams, bomb sniffing dogs, etc. so the police commissioner can tell the media that the LEOs lost the teenager.
Lift the "stay in your house" order, and then get a phone call from some local guy who simply walked out of his house and found the guy all those truckloads of SWAT team guys couldn't find in 14 hours of looking.
I'm as glad as anybody that the terrorists got killed and/or caught, but if the response we saw in Boston by the government is any measure of the capabilities of the people who planned it, they learned a set of very ineffective techniques.