This week in American power projection: the map was wrong, the dorms were fine, and the travel card was for official purposes.
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Pentagon casualties, metric improvement, and Fat Leonard’s least dignified phase.
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This week in American power projection: the map was wrong, the dorms were fine, and the travel card was for official purposes.
Story Roundup
Situation Report
It all sounded so familiar.
KABUL — U.S. military officers involved with planning the War in Afghanistan have been caught plagiarizing plans from the 1970s to lose the Vietnam War, according to a new report on the decades-long conflict that abruptly ended on Sunday.
“I thought the plans looked a little strange at first, but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Then I noticed they forgot to update some of the charts,” said Dr. Tim Plumber, an author of the report. “In the Afghanistan surge plans from 2009, there are two whole pages about off-limits brothels in Saigon.”
After reviewing hundreds of planning documents from both wars, Plumber’s team said it was obvious they had just copied and pasted “Afghanistan” into places where the documents previously said “Vietnam.” When they saw that one of the overarching goals of the war was to contain the spread of communism into Northern Helmand Province, they knew something was fishy.
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