Excellent piece by Colonel H. R. McMaster in the current World Affairs - The Human Element: When Gadgetry Becomes Strategy.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the political debates concerning the nature and scope of US involvement in those countries, have resurrected the “lessons” of Vietnam once again. Far from having kicked the “Vietnam syndrome,” as President George H. W. Bush put it in the exuberant aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, it now seems possible that the memory of the Vietnam War will be forever conflated in the public imagination with the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, producing something like a Vietnam syndrome on steroids...

Much more at World Affairs.