I would agree with you.
I've been giving this a lot of thought lately. In my opinion, what we are seeing now is the result of a culture that has set in in the Army because of the decades long Cold War. Your training life in Germany- for example- consisted of regularly scheduled trips to Graf and Hohenfels maybe a trip to the MOUT site at Hammelburg every once in a while and during the Cold War itself, a regular trip up the East German border to patrol.
Field deployments for combat maneuver training were short and intense. After a while, all the troops learn that "well, if I flip my underwear inside out after 7-10 days- I'm good to go for field hygiene". A complicating problem in Hohenfels is many units did their training "in the box" in the winter when it is very difficult to get the men to practice any sort of meaningful hygiene. As long as their electric razor's battery doesn't run out in 3 weeks no water is going to touch their skin. I also knew guys who could hold their sh!t for weeks on end because they didn't want to take a crap outside. The point being, you'd have guys who spent years in this environment (US Army Europe) learning to survive Hohenfels and Graf but not necessarily how to survive in the elements for an extended period. These same soldiers go on to other units taking this learned culture with them. This is something that affects the thinking of the lowest Private right on up to the NCOs and Officers. Support and supply were used to solving problems for short times and with known, geographically conveniant logistical situations.
Another thing about this culture was it also instilled in the spouses the idea that deployments are short and what a soldier's life really consisted of was the garrison environment most of the time and a small amount of time spent training. Then with the downsize, we started getting deployed more often and for longer. But still this attitude remains- "a deployment is supposed to be six months, a year tops". I guess what I'm saying is, a culture arose within the Army that had/has solid ideas about what "routine" Army life should be like.
The more I think about it, the more I see this "culture of routine soldiery" being one source of the anger that some of the soldiers in Iraq and their families back home seem to be having. While I don't think we need to go so far as to pound it into recruits heads that they will be living in a foxhole for four years and not to expect anything more, I think we would do well to dispel this notion that "I'm supposed to get off every day at final formation and go home". I think the Army needs to emphasize more to potential recruits that being in the Army does mean that there are no guarantees and that they could very well be sent overseas for years if not for their entire enlistment because that is the nature of the missions our nation is involved with these days.
I don't want to get off on a tangent though. You're right, the Army has had a difficult time training itself and its troops for long term deployment and has problems solving some of these problems that arise as a result. But on the flip-side, it is very difficult to train for long deployment without actually deploying for a long time. I'm of a couple opinions on this. I believe an Army ought to train hard. But sometimes the best training is the mission itself and in this day and age, maybe the best way to solve many of these logistial problems for a long term mission is simply to jump in and see if what you have floats and trust your ability to solve the problems as they come up.
One thing's for certain. Contrary to what many people believe- the Army does learn from its mistakes. And they're getting better at it. When we were training up for Bosnia, we were getting live reports from that theatre from the guys on the ground that would get implemented into the training very soon so the training was useful. I'm sure the Army might be having some problems with certain aspects of this current mission but I'm also confident they will adapt their way of doing things and improve on these things in the future.