Some American commanders doubt the value of the North Waziristan deal and claim that attacks on their troops have greatly increased since it was signed on September 5th.
Even so, there is considerable skepticism in Washington and among United States military commanders about the value of the training, and the strains caused by the airstrikes have now brought into the open blunt expressions of dissatisfaction with the Pakistanis that officials had kept mostly private.
Taking control of Sinjar will have significant strategic value, commanders say, cutting IS supply lines between Iraq's second city of Mosul, which it overran in June 2014, and Raqqa in Syria, the capital of its self-proclaimed caliphate. .
Since 2001, commanders have debated the value of releasing body counts in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they have drawn inevitable and unfavorable comparisons to the quagmire in Vietnam.
Regarding the importance of military robots, for instance, the Pentagon's Dyke Weatherington explained, "Combatant commanders and warfighters place value in the inherent features of unmanned systems -- especially their persistence, versatility, and reduced risk to human life". .
Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, commander of Multinational Corps Iraq, on Thursday ordered American commanders to conduct core values training with all troops on moral and ethical standards on the battlefield.
To the department's credit, he said, it has changed its manual to ban practices like allowing a commander to change the value of stolen property after an Internet search.
The NATO command has been intently focused on the issue since an attack in western Afghanistan on Aug. 22, when an AC-130 gunship mounted a nighttime raid on what the United States intelligence has identified as a meeting of about 30 Taliban fighters with a "high value" Taliban commander.
The Robertson family of "Duck Dynasty" fame is now wading into the world of Christian publishing with the release of a new book and DVD, Faith Commander: Living Five Values From The Parables Of Jesus, which is a five-week church curriculum.
The night raids against "high value" targets — Taliban commanders and others suspected of playing major roles in the insurgency — are a linchpin of the American-led coalition's strategy in Afghanistan.
