During WWI, British officers were famous for living well back from the front and living luxuriously well, while their soldiers lived and died in mud. I only recently read
 "The last true story" a memoir of a US National Guardsman who "served" in Iraq. The grisly picture of effect of the US occupation on Iraq comes through well, but what also is striking is the gross incompetence, stupidity, delusion, and lack of responsibility in the Republican officer class. While the soldiers live 15 to a room without even fans in the Iraqi summer, sleeping on bare floors with no water, patrolling the streets with no mission, equipped with Vietnam era worthless body armor, lacking guidance, intelligence, or any semblance of a plan, the officers cower in air-conditioned fortresses, emerging only to play Patton and give cliched speeches to soldiers whose names they can't bother to remember.

Somehow, without a heriditary aristocracy, the US has found itself managed by a collection of twits who could have emerged from Mayfair.