This should be higher on Hitchens list. As in all wars, there is no substitute for the knowledge you gain of your enemy as when locked in combat.
Without the lessons & intelligence gleaned from Afghanistan and Iraq... we would be no more aware of the Islamo-fascist mind than we were on 9/12/2001.
That's another thing: there are tens of thousands of Ba'ath Party documents stored in Kuwait, with only half a dozen people to go through and interpret them. You'd think there would be a higher priority on those. A LOT higher.
You are right. When you compare the Union Army's first battles compared to how they fought at Gettysburg, Overland, there is no comparison.
Likewise, how the US soldier fought in their first engagments in Africa and how they fought in Normandy, Bulge.
The US military now has experience fighting a special ops war, a conventional war and an insurgency. If the US military can get its information war in gear this would help.
You're right. I was glad to see his point #10, since it's important but rarely gets mentioned. America's military is now incontestably the world's premier nation-building and counterinsurgency force. Heaven forbid that we would have to undertake anything like Iraq again anytime soon, but if it had to happen, or if we found ourselves faced with some other situation where those skills might come in handy, we'll be the best equipped to do it -- not the UN or Europe or anyone else, by a longshot (an even longer shot than before). We now have a superior understanding of how to build a nation and how to fight an insurgency, because we've done it. We've made plenty of mistakes, but we've gotten our hands dirty and done the hard work and learned (and are learning) from them. We've gained mastery in areas where mastery can be gained only through experience. This is no small thing. It would be hard to overstate the value of having hundreds of thousands of troops and their leaders experienced and hardened in what will no doubt be the prevalent mode of warfare in the forseeable future.