As he winds down a remarkable Pentagon career – overseeing two long and very costly wars, wrestling with a military-industrial complex resistant to his budget moves aimed at questionable weapons, and shaking up the senior officer corps – Defense Secretary Robert Gates has a message for his successor.

“Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General [Douglas] MacArthur so delicately put it.”

In referring to Iraq and Afghanistan, as he did elsewhere in his speech to cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point Friday, Defense Secretary Gates was not directly critical of the man he replaced – Donald Rumsfeld – or of the Bush administration’s leading an invasion of Iraq now generally acknowledged to have been based on faulty reasoning, insufficient preparation, and – initially, at least – poor execution.

That’s not Gates’s style. And in fact, Rumsfeld’s inclination was to take Iraq with as few troops as possible, while many of those in the Bush administration predicted a quick victory. No “big American land army” for them.

But Gates’s message was clear: The US military services, as well as the elected and appointed civilians who send them to war, need better ways of foreseeing and preparing for national security threats.

“We can’t know with absolute certainty what the future of warfare will hold, but we do know it will be exceedingly complex, unpredictable, and – as they say in the staff colleges – ‘unstructured’,” he said. “Just think about the range of security challenges we face right now beyond Iraq and Afghanistan: terrorism and terrorists in search of weapons of mass destruction, Iran, North Korea, military modernization programs in Russia and China, failed and failing states, revolution in the Middle East, cyber, piracy, proliferation, natural and man-made disasters, and more.”

“And I must tell you, when it comes to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements, since Vietnam, our record has been perfect,” he quipped. “We have never once gotten it right, from the Mayaguez to Grenada, Panama, Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, Kuwait, Iraq, and more – we had no idea a year before any of these missions that we would be so engaged.”

“There has been an overwhelming tendency of our defense bureaucracy to focus on preparing for future high-end conflicts – priorities often based, ironically, on what transpired in the last century – as opposed to the messy fights in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.

After last Friday, it's fair to conclude that further major U.S. combat in Afghanistan makes no sense. Case in point: The U.S. military announcement carried in Friday's New York Times and Washington Post that American troops were withdrawing from an obscure valley it once termed "central" to the war effort. Vital yesterday, not today. Is it possible for anyone to figure out how to fight this war?

*snip*

The Times story opened deadpan, pointing out that U.S. commanders in Afghanistan are taking troops out of the Pech valley in eastern Afghanistan not far from the border with Pakistan—a location they once termed "central" to the war effort. Now, apparently, it was no longer "central" or "vital." Now, despite the many lives and limbs lost in years of fierce battle there, it was no longer strategically worth continued American losses. It once was; it isn't now. May those who fell there rest in peace.

Now, the commanders determined, U.S. troops in that desolate place would better serve the overall campaign elsewhere—protecting population areas instead of defending against remote Taliban operations.

The inescapable point of these news stories is that the U.S. military doesn't know how to judge what's vital inside Afghanistan and what's not.

Now, as both news stories made clear, the commanders did not claim "mission accomplished" in Pech because the mission was NOT accomplished. The Taliban continue to operate effectively in the area. Both stories also noted that Afghan forces would be replacing the American battalion of 800. But, of course, no one would venture even to hint that they could or would fight effectively or for very long. The conclusion seems inescapable: Deploying that U.S. brigade into Pech in the first place was a military miscalculation, and the losses, a mistake. But judge for yourself as you listen to the explanations in the Times by U.S. commanders. "After years of fighting for control of a prominent valley in the rugged mountains of eastern Afghanistan," the Times account begins, "the United States military has begun to pull back most of its forces from ground it once insisted was central to the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda."

Of course, U.S. commanders worry that the troops who served in Pech will conclude that their sacrifices were in vain. Over 100 U.S. troops died in that impossible terrain. But, says regional commander General John F. Campbell, "I prefer to look at [the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Pech] as realigning to provide better security for the Afghan people." He added: "I don't want the impression we're abandoning the Pech."