Sgt. Mark Fayloga/U.S. Marine Corps Photo An active-duty US Marine captain wrote a stinging op-ed for the Marine Corps Gazette, going through all the problems he sees with the Department of Defense and the Marine Corps in addition to recent failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The biggest problem, according to Capt. Joshua Waddell, is "self-delusion."

"Let us first begin with the fundamental underpinnings of this delusion: our measures of performance and effectiveness in recent wars," he wrote. "It is time that we, as professional military officers, accept the fact that we lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."

The active-duty infantry officer, who served with and lost Marines under his command with 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, in Afghanistan, didn't come to this conclusion lightly. He said it took several years for him to accept that, with the goal of improving the system.

A case in point, he says, is a comparison of the US military with other adversaries.

The Pentagon's budget dwarfs the combined defense spending of the next 10 countries. The Army and Marine Corps are arguably the best-trained fighting forces in the world. The Air Force has the most high-tech aircraft and weaponry, while the Navy maintains nearly 20 aircraft carriers — far more than adversaries like Russia and China that have only one each.

These stats should mean the US military is unstoppable, but the budget, talk of being the best in the world, and other claims it makes don't square with measures of effectiveness, Waddell writes.

"How, then, have we been bested by malnourished and undereducated men with antiquated and improvised weaponry whilst spending trillions of dollars in national treasure and costing the lives of thousands of servicemen and hundreds of thousands of civilians?" he wrote.

Waddell continues:

"For example, a multibillion-dollar aircraft carrier that can be bested by a few million dollars in the form of a swarming missile barrage or a small unmanned aircraft system (UAS) capable of rendering its flight deck unusable does not retain its dollar value in real terms. Neither does the M1A1 tank, which is defeated by $20 worth of household items and scrap metal rendered into an explosively-formed projectile.

"The Joint Improvised Threat Defeat Organization has a library full of examples like these, and that is without touching the weaponized return on investment in terms of industrial output and capability development currently being employed by our conventional adversaries."

His article isn't just a critique; Waddell offers several solutions to get the military out of the "business-as-usual" mindset that looks good in PowerPoint briefs but doesn't translate to success on the ground.

While military leaders typically complain to Congress that constrained budgets have a "crippling" effect on the military, Waddell says the military should work more efficiently with the money it has. He gives an example of a nation already doing this: Russia.

Moscow's military budget is about $52 billion, versus Washington's proposed defense budget of $583 billion. Yet with far less money, Russia has been a consistent thorn in the US's side in Syria, Ukraine, and now Afghanistan. That's not to mention Moscow's success in cyberwarfare.

"This is the same Russian military whom the RAND Corporation has estimated would be unstoppable in an initial conventional conflict in the Baltic states, even against the combined might of the NATO forces stationed there," Waddell wrote. "Given the generous funding the American people have bequeathed us to provide for the common defense, is it so unreasonable to seek an efficient frontier of that resource's utility?"

Waddell's critique includes a call to fix inefficiencies between the Defense Department getting gear to war fighters, as some have to buy things they need because they don't get there before they deploy. Waddell also calls for an audit of the Marines to see whether there are redundant efforts among contractors.

"There is no reason we should be paying twice for the same work or, as is often the case, paying government personnel for work that they have instead outsourced to more capable contractors for tasks within the government worker's job description," he wrote. "I would be willing to bet that a savvy staff officer with access to these position and billet descriptions as well as contracting line items could save the Marine Corps millions of dollars by simply hitting Control+F (find all) on his keyboard, querying key tasks, and counting redundancies."

It's unclear how much of an effect this op-ed would have on any changes. The Marine Corps Gazette is read mostly by senior Marine leadership, but whether that translates to taking this captain's advice in an institution that is resistant to change is an open question.

"I have watched Marines charge headlong into enemy fire and breach enemy defenses with the enemy's own captured IEDs in order to engage in close combat," Waddell wrote. "This same fighting spirit from which we draw so much pride must be replicated by our senior leaders in leading comprehensive reform of our Corps' capabilities and in creating a supporting establishment truly capable of fostering innovation."