The third self-inflicted wound is forgetting what the U.S. military is and isn't designed to do, and ending up in costly efforts to remake the politics of areas that we do not understand. U.S. armed forces are extremely good at deterring or reversing large-scale conventional aggression, at preserving balance of power in key regions, and contributing to other aspects of global stability, like putting teeth in programs like the Proliferation Security Initiative. But the United States is not good at governing other societies -- who is? -- particularly when it lacks detailed knowledge of the societies in question, has insufficient language skills within the national security and foreign policy establishments, and when the prerequisites for democracy are absent from these areas. It follows that our current preoccupation with counterinsurgency -- which is largely an artifact of the decisions to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq on a long-term basis -- is a strategic misstep. [my emphasis]