Numerous reflections exist regarding who should be held accountable and what lessons should be learned from the military withdrawal and political collapse of Afghanistan. This essay argues that the failures in Afghanistan are second- and third-order effects of a failure of strategic thinking on behalf of civilian and military leadership alike. I argue that this failure of strategic thinking is caused, in part, by the overreliance on concepts of civil–military relations espoused by Samuel Huntington. These concepts have been inculcated by a professional military education system that has subsequently developed a generation of officers with an atrophied appreciation for the political aspects of war, and an inability to link operational prowess to the achievement of strategic objectives. This dilemma is aggravated by a similar overreliance on systematic thinking, which further obscures the linkages between the military and political aspects of strategy.

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An optical technique is described which is capable of compensating the effects of imperfect spatial coherent illumination on the performance of a modified Mach-Zehnder spectrum analyzer. Methods for experimentally determining the complex mutual coherence function of the illumination using the analyzer are also described. The addition to the system of a calibrated phase shifter controlled by a minicomputer is proposed, which permits the spectral amplitude and phase to be determined automatically in real time.