Finally finding time to read the entire article I must say that although I obviously can't verify most of his statements, I found it remarkably well-written and reasonable. It also rhymes well with what I heard when I did my military service.
Speaking of which, there is an interesting thing I came to think of. Many of my officers had been on various UN missions and said that the US army suffered from problems not unlike some of (definitely not all) those described in the article. Namely, a tendency to put rank above all else. E.g. when a Swedish (or indeed any) soldier wanted to communicate something to a US officer, the US officer first checked the rank of the prospective speaker and let that decide whether he should listen or not.
(From the Swedish side, that is routinely managed by temporarily adjusting the soldiers' ranks in advance of a mission. Generally they are moved up a step, unless someone is a 2nd lieutenant (fänrik in Swedish) in which case they are moved down to sergeant instead; the reason being the tendency of the US corps to view 2nd lieutenants as inexperienced snobs fresh from West Point, while the sergeant is seen as possessor of vast amounts of down-to-earth competence.)
Another thing they reported was the extreme specialisation of the US army (compared to the Swedish army), where the tank driver could indeed drive a tank very well, but not much else. It should be noted however that this was not stemming from any cultural tendency to withhold information, but rather an effect of having a professional army. It's reasonable to assume that it's often not the intellectual elite of a country that chooses to be a machinegunner for a living.
I don't say this to make the US army look bad. These are remarks on an entirely different scale than that in the article, and the US army has proven to be very effective in battle. Following a US look at Arab armies however, I thought it could be interesting with a Swedish look at the US army! The Swedish army is one of the "flattest" organised in the world (or so I have been told), and although Sweden hasn't had a war since 1814 it has time and again in UN missions proven to function very well. How it would measure up against the US army given equal manpower and equipment I do not know and would rather not speculate, but my last point is that the issues brought up by the Swedish officers should not be dismissed out of hand as coming from people with no experience.
Finally, I'd like to emphasise that the above statements are neither my first-hand experience nor normative; they're just observations made by Swedish officers, nothing more, nothing less.
