Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
This.It's pretty obvious to anyone with even a cursory understanding of how our promotions and retention work that there are some pretty perverse incentives at work that can create less-than-ideal outcomes, especially in the O-4/O-5 ranks. But what the article completely misses and you seem to ignore is that we accomplish nearly every tactical mission that is handed down to us. However, winning wars is not just about winning battles--a large part of winning wars is actually having a concrete, realistically achievable objective when you go to war. This was not the case in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq.
We have 'lost' a handful of wars while inflicting casualties at more a 3:1 - 9:1 rate (depending on what estimate you use and which war you are discussing). The speed at which the U.S. invaded Iraq and toppled the government was nothing short of remarkable and we can only hope that these lessons are not being taught to foreign militaries. From a core competency standpoint, you'd be very hard pressed to make an intelligent argument that the U.S. military and its officer corps are not proficient at fighting the enemy. The poor outcomes are due to nebulous political objectives that simply cannot be realized by killing lots of people.