In one of their more infamous skits, the “Frog and the Peach,” Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore played a mishapen restauranteur and the food critic from a major London newspaper. Cooke had located his restaurant in the middle of the Yorkshire bogs – no problem with parking, just in extracting the cars afterward. One specialty of the house was “frog á la peche” – a giant frog with a peach in its mouth with boiling cointreau poured over the melange. The other was “peche á la frog” – a giant peach with boiling cointreau poured over it – from which, when cut open, tadpoles swam out. Needless to say, the restaurant was not a success. At the end of the interview, Dudley Moore asked Peter Cooke whether he had learned from his mistakes. Cooke's reply was brief and to the point: “Yes, I have studied my mistakes from every point of view, gone over them again and again, and feel fully confident I can repeat every one of them!”

Unfortunately, that story is all too relevant to the performance of statesmen, military institutions, and generals over the course of the past 2,500 years. If the reader feels such a comparison is overly harsh, the comments of a highly regarded retired U.S. Army general examining the performance of military institutions of the great powers in the first half of the twentieth century should suggest that the comparison is all too apt: