McChrystal is exactly right. Our all volunteer military has not and will not conclusively win any wars. It has nothing to do with the ability to fight and everything to do with the will.
There is currently far too much disconnect between the war fighters and the society they represent. The best we can hope for these days are trillion dollar, decade long stalemates.
Its easy to blame the leadership, but the problem is far deeper than them. It’s in our society. The cheap and easy answer we came up with was to divorce society from warfighting, and give a small number of troops higher pay and better training in exchange for not asking the rest of society to contribute anything to the wars we fight. It’s created a fantasy version of bloodless war for our civilians, and reduced our military operations to kabuki dance rituals.
The sooner we can re-introduce society at large to the reality of war, the sooner we might win another one (and likely, the less often we’ll go).
Vietnam shoots your thesis to hell and gone.