This was a very bad reason to praise Generation Kill, because it was an inaccurate and unfair assessment of the miniseries' sense of the Iraq War: the Marines the drama follows kill some civilians, but spare many more. Since Generation Kill is clearly interested in the death of civilians in war, is the above passage merely hyperbole? I do not think so, for Maass' response to the show suggests something of broader interest: a widely-held and catastrophic misunderstanding of what is possible in war, and hence a broadly defamatory and unjust assessment of anyone who makes war in the modern world.

Maass wrote that Generation Kill "certainly provides abundant evidence of inept preparation. There are not enough batteries for night optics, maps are late in arriving, the Humvees are not armored, and no one in the battalion, aside from its disheveled interpreter, speaks more than a word or two of Arabic. Yet those types of shortcomings, as well as the ineptitude of some members of the unit­--a vital supply truck is hastily abandoned in battle, commanders are obsessed with facial hair, a captain orders his men to go the wrong way on a road--­are rooted in systemic faults that predate the election of George Bush in 2000. The Bush team was incompetent and naïve--­the critics are right about that­--but the military had more than enough built-in deficiencies to undermine even a well-planned conquest of Iraq. Snafu, which is a military acronym that stands for 'Situation Normal: All Fucked Up,' did not come out of Iraq; its origins are generally traced to World War II."

All of the details mentioned above are accurate, as is Maass' etymology of snafu. His implication seems to be that the American Army has always been grotesquely incompetent, and that in the Second World War it was as madly and needlessly destructive as in Iraq in 2003. In fact, the American armed forces were in many ways more destructive of civilian lives and property in the Second World War than in the Iraq War-their weapons were less accurate, and their strategy more savage. The American armed forces had their share of defects during the Second World War, many of them on display early on, at the Kasserine Pass, and in the fighting in Italy, but others on display most places they fought. How, then did the American armed forces win their share of the Second World War? By gross material advantage, and riding to victory on the back of the Russians? Those are, of course, explanations that have tempted the Germans, along with many others. But the Russians, too, were notoriously clumsy and error-ridden, and eventually more richly endowed with materiel than were their German adversaries. Were the British, with a long military tradition uninterrupted by either Communism or the radical triumph of a commercial society, the ones who fought without blunders? Not in France and the Low Countries and Norway in 1940, nor in Crete the following year, nor in Singapore, or at Arnheim, etc. Perhaps all of the Allies blundered to victory, and only the immensely competent Germans were an Army worthy of the name?