How did the 9/11 wars change the Army?

That was the question a friend posed the other day. Here,
slightly edited for clarity and further reflection, is what I wrote back to
him:

My impression is that
the Army is kind of all over the place these days. It reminds me a bit of the
years in the mid-1950s before the Pentomic Army.

The looming budget
cuts are the biggest thing shaping today's force. The Army may be going into
what Eliot Cohen once called "the Uptonian hunker,"
waiting for the budget cuts to hit.

The second biggest
thing is the dog that isn't barking. As far as I can see, there is very little
interest in turning over the rock to figure out what the Army has learned in
the last 10 years, how it has changed, what it has done well, what it hasn't.
More than a Harry Summers, where is the intellectual equivalent of a
self-evaluation such as the 1970 study on Army
professionalism? Shouldn't the Army be asking itself how it has changed,
and looking at  the state of its officer corps? We have seen some terrible
leadership but very little official inclination to examine its causes. A couple
of years ago, I noticed in reviewing my notes for my book Fiasco that, to an extent I hadn't noticed while writing it, it was
the battalion commanders' critique of their generals.  

We have seen had huge
changes in the way the Army fights. It isn't just the flirtation with
conventional troops doing COIN. ( U.S. troop-intensive COIN has indeed gone out
of intellectual fashion, but not I think a more FID-ish COIN.) It also is:

An Army that does
indeed win first battles but still doesn't believe that war termination is its
business. (See the Bacevich piece in the
Moten volume.)


An Army whose
generals frequently do not seem to be able to think strategically, and treats
those who do as outliers.


An Army that cannot
fight without the presence of thousands of mercenaries on the battlefield,
subject to neither local law nor military justice, and so polluting American
efforts.


An Army that
has fought our first sustained overseas war (and in fact, 2 of them) without a
draft. (The all-volunteer force has proven remarkably cohesive and resilient
under the resulting stress.)  


The one area where
the Army seems genuinely comfortable is the technological, with information
systems rapidly advancing, especially the use of drone aircraft for
reconnaissance.

What are your
thoughts, grasshoppers? What am I missing?