Since the most likely path to war with Iran is not Marines storming the beach but a strike on nuclear facilities and "regime" targets, signs such as these can often just be mirages. The true strike is not necessarily going to come with any warning, and the U.S. military has developed an entire system called "global strike" to implement such a preemptive strike.

A secret mission conducted last August over Afghanistan caught my eye because it tells us everything we need to know about the ability of the U.S. military to conduct a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack in Iran. It also tells us how useless such a strike might be.

But just because this is the consensus view does not mean it is right. The danger, regardless of who is the next president, is that officials have already begun military preparations, and shaping public opinion, to build momentum for the inevitable.

So we are supposed to listen to the guy who presided over Iraq's implosion and Abu Ghraib?

Though it is true that a Secretary of the Army and a few generals and other officers have been relieved as a result of the Walter Reed scandals, the larger scandal is that our defense budget has never been bigger while the number in uniform has hardly ever been smaller, and yet we still are unable to fulfill our Constitutional responsibilities - our Constitutional responsibilities - to support and maintain a military.

The first impulse when the subject of supporting the troops comes up is either to have more troops (!) or spend more money. This is the stance of all three presidential candidates, by the way. No one is saying: Where the hell does the half a trillion dollars we spend every year on defense go? Not even anyone in Congress seems to be that alarmed that we could be so incompetent or wasteful or inattentive that hospitals and barracks could, in this day and age, be "appalling." And I might add that under the Constitution it is the responsibility of Congress to support and maintain the Army and the Navy.

The answer is clearly not more money: The Pentagon has got to be the only large-scale enterprise on the planet (after all, the Soviet Union is gone) where the more it screws up, the more it fails its workers, the more it fails to produce a bottom line, the more it gets. I've asked many times before where all that money goes. What is appalling is that not very man people in power seem to any longer care.

We are now at a similar moment with Iran. Short of Iran invading one of its neighbors or attacking U.S. forces in some obvious and gross way, the Iran war isn't going to be Dick Cheney's war. It will be waged by Hillary Clinton, John McCain or Barack Obama.

Oh, and Rome? We're still going nowhere in Iraq (read: we're losing because we aren't going to win) and any diversion -- glowing reports on the surge, the promotion of Gen. David Petraeus, Syria's nuclear program, the unmanageable bureaucracy -- supports the proposition that the "system" is at fault or imperfect. Yet the war itself remains the actual problem.

Meanwhile, the increasing reliance on unmanned attack drones, as reported in USA Today, and the increased use of airpower in general, seems the perfect military and technological solution. But the phenomenon also has a negative impact on the war effort and profound consequences for the future.

In a place like Iraq, the needles are terrorists and their support infrastructure, such as small-scale works where improvised explosive devices are manufactured. Very little is behind the walls of some military compound. There are no tanks or other large pieces of equipment to detect and monitor. In fact, the terrorists live, work and hide in otherwise normal civilian homes, in an urban jumble.

The frustration over finding these needles, and the larger frustration in Iraq and overall in the war against terrorism, is the disconnect between the supposed gravity of the threat and the ability of the intelligence community to produce adequate and timely information to fight it. At one end of the scale is Osama bin Laden's continued ability to evade detection, even after some seven years of looking. At the other is the task of figuring who the enemies are in places like Iraq, much less how many there are and what they are up to.

I say may not be true because it is important to understand that the intelligence -- both American and Israeli -- is limited and even elliptical, and though I don't doubt that the two countries cooperate on weapons of mass destruction -- Hezbollah's main long-range missile used against Israel in the 2006 war was a Syrian/North Korean hybrid -- getting the goods regarding clandestine nuclear developments, and then proving that the intent is to develop nuclear weapons, is incredibly difficult.

In fact, the whole question of nuclear weapons is so prone to hyperbole that if the actual intent is to dissuade nations from developing nuclear weapons, the best road is transparency and accountability -- not bombing, exaggeration and mystery.

Petraeus as the new Middle East commander is neither good news nor bad. I hope he is smart enough to get working on a "plan" for withdrawal for the new president. And I hope he will understand the folly of picking a fight with Iran (or Pakistan) at the end of an extremely unsuccessful administration.

But the truth is we never really know what these generals really think because to become a four-star and to become a regional commander, one has to be pretty polished and careful. And after 9/11, the power and role of the regional commanders has been weakened. It will be interesting to see whether King David changes that.

Given his short tenure (by the end of the Bush administration he will barely have been in the job two years), it will be hard to criticize him for not getting much done. He inherited a multitude of conflicts, a wounded military and a bulging budget. Still, it is possible to find fault with his recent comments about military culture and military-civilian relations.

The New York Times' investigation into the relationship between the Pentagon and retired military officers who serve as paid "analysts" for television focused on the wrong issues. The problem is not necessarily that the networks employ former officers as analysts, or that the Pentagon reaches out to them.

The larger problem is the role these general play, not just on TV but in American society. In our modern era, not-so-old soldiers neither die nor fade away -- they become board members and corporate icons and consultants, on TV and elsewhere, and even among this group of generally straight-shooters, there is a strong reluctance to say anything that would jeopardize their consulting gigs or positions on corporate boards.

Like most military leaders and national-security sages, Mullen embraces the reality of global unpredictability and argues that the military needs more resources to confront it. But unpredictability is not code for a blank check.

It's not that the brass intentionally trumpets threats to get what it wants. It's more that it is rarely asked to take responsibility for what it gets wrong. So even though the national security establishment failed to prepare for or anticipate 9/11, even though it made the wrong call on Afghanistan in 2002, even though it misread Iraq and the war there has drained the American military in a way that it never anticipated, even though it made the wrong assumptions on Pakistan, we're now supposed to listen to its worldview -- and, of course, pay deference to it.

But his victory has no traction. The almost universal battle cry remains: "When we are getting out?" The military, which a year ago was talking about decades in Iraq, is now talking about billions -- of dollars that is, for the future. Our military is so over this war.

The White House will announce today that soldiers deploying will in the future have 12-month combat tours instead of the current 15. The decision, administration officials say, is meant to repair a damaged military stressed to the breaking point by long and repeated tours of duty.

What's really happening is that a White House that has no other plan for Iraq is trying to demonstrate its sensitivity to the soldiers and hoping to influence public opinion by showing its support for the troops.But the troops and their families know that real respite won't come until the war is over altogether, that the military is too small for the missions asked of it.