David Barno, the former Army three-star commander of the Afghanistan war turned CNAS fellow, writes up a recent Army wargame for Tom Ricks’ blog. There’s good stuff in there about how Gen. Dempsey and Brig. Gen. McMaster want the Army to focus what it anticipates will be lean-years budgeting for 2014-2019 around keeping the Iraq/Afghanistan generation of junior leaders (and, by then, senior leaders) from leaving the service. But there are also a lot of context-less anonymous fly-on-the-wall quotes from the game that I don’t know what to do with. Like for instance:

Beware Heroic Assumptions in the Next World” — not all wars will be like Iraq and Afghanistan. What’s the most demanding scenario the Army could face?

I’d love to know how the participants examined that question. In fact, I’d love to know what the words “Heroic” and “Like” mean here! But Barno moves on to the next tidbit — ironic, given the wargame’s apparent antipathy to PowerPoint — without clarifying what’s really up for discussion. It’s a shame, and I suspect that if a journalist provided such an account of a unit or an effort that Barno commanded, the general would be pretty dissatisfied.