Above the battlefield, air force, navy, and Marine Corps high-performance aircraft and drones operated with virtual impunity. On the ground, despite possessing superior arms and equipment, GIs enjoyed few advantages. Rather than keeping to the tidy pattern envisioned in the Joint Vision, combat in Afghanistan and Iraq did not differ materially from the chaos and confusion that earlier generations of U.S. troops had encountered when pursuing rebellious Filipino nationalists at the turn of the twentieth century or fighting Vietnamese guerrillas in the 1960s. At a certain level, all dirty wars
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