good advice for obama

Tom Ricks interviews a leading proponent of counterinsurgency doctrine to discover if the right incentives are in place to attract our "best and brightest" to where they're needed most:

We are still not selecting all of our advisors for their expertise, tracking those who have this experience, or properly rewarding them for their service in both the most demanding and most important counterinsurgency mission we're doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is still no advisor incentive pay or distinctive 'Combat Advisor' badge or insignia; we provide both to Airborne-qualified personnel, although it's hard to argue that that skill is more important today than the ability to teach our friends and allies to fight insurgents so we don't have to (and I say this as someone who wore my Airborne wings with pride for more than twenty years).

So.. no.