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The Army video touting its Future Combat Systems has superb production values. Set in an unidentified country that resembles Indonesia, it opens with a get-her-phone-number enlisted medic rushing around a rural clinic to save a feverish child. Vital signs are transmitted to expert physicians in the U.S. via the FCS’s satellite link, an instant diagnosis is given, and an injection of antibiotics saves the little girl.

Of course, saving sick children isn’t all that the video claims the FCS can do. Rapid-fire edits cut to the detection of a suspicious character entering a tactical unit’s area of operations. With the help of a handsome, Red Bull-drinking CIA type with a two-day growth of beard, a comprehensive array of sensors delivers an instantaneous facial-recognition ID from a classified database. The FCS tracks the suspected terrorist to a nearby hideout, where four more thugs wait to wreak havoc upon the innocent.

FCS to the rescue! With effortless precision, our troops close in, sending jackrabbit terrorists scampering into the cane fields. Shots are exchanged — briefly — and one terrorist crumples (no blood, however — it looks more like indigestion). The rest of the bad guys are swiftly corralled by minirobots and taken down by Officer G.I. Joe. One expects to hear those vile insurgents — who surely would rob that child of her medicine — declare, “Ya got me this time, detective, I gotta give ya credit.”

The minifilm ends with a grateful mother thanking our medic — who maintains impressive grooming standards throughout — in halting English that’s supposed to bring a tear to the viewer’s eye. The scene called to mind Oscar Wilde’s remark that anyone who doesn’t laugh out loud over the death of Little Nell has no heart.

Caught up in the pace of the video, it may take the viewer a few moments to realize the triviality of the events portrayed in the film: FCS saves a child from a virus and captures five clownish terrorists.

That’s what we get for more than $100 billion over two decades? A healthy kid and five hooligans in handcuffs?

What struck me most profoundly at a preview of the video was that nobody really gets hurt (our cute-as-a-hot-button medic nurtures the all-thumbs terrorist who was briefly inconvenienced by a bullet). There’s no blood. The entire scenario is as antiseptic as the syringe the pinup medic uses on the sick kid. I’m told that a second video illustrates what the FCS could bring to an urban fight. I haven’t seen it, but I’ll bet there’s no blood, torn limbs, spilled guts, splashed brains, furious curses or screams of agony in it. Hope I’m wrong, but I suspect that FCS will be shown directing traffic.

(Since this critique was drafted, I’ve seen the urban warfare video. Its sterile depiction of combat — with yet another rescue of a wounded terrorist, thank you — would make an Iraq veteran howl with derision; there are a few tiny drops of ketchup in this one, but our enemies are depicted as brainless bowling pins, set up to be knocked down at no cost to the bowler, and one is left asking what the FCS can do that a 500-pound bomb can’t.)

The problem here isn’t the FCS, which shows great potential — as long as the Army doesn’t fall into the Air Force practice of promising more than any system ever could deliver. The troubling aspect is the instinctive political correctness of the goofball counterinsurgency video (which undoubtedly cost the taxpayer as much as a good indie film, whether funded directly by the Army or by a contractor who wrote it off as a business expense). What’s the fundamental purpose of FCS? One would assume it’s intended to kill our enemies and destroy their ability to carry on the fight while shattering their will. That would justify the cost. But a single Special Forces A-Team could do everything in that counterinsurgency video more dependably, with a much smaller footprint and $100 billion cheaper.

Has the Army forgotten what war is? (The No. 1 complaint I now hear from officers in Iraq is about “green-zone generals” who have no idea what the streets outside their bubble are like — our military leaders are beginning to sound uncomfortably like World War I’s “chateaux generals.”) Is the always-dutiful, ever-unimaginative Army signing up for the Air Force’s claim that technology can win the wars of the future without disturbing our enemy’s beauty sleep? Do the Army’s senior leaders now believe in the myth of bloodless war? Hasn’t Iraq taught them anything?

Where are the Army generals honestly and honorably telling the president and the American public that “war means fighting, and fighting means killing”? It’s getting harder and harder to find them. The extent to which the Army’s leadership has signed up for peace, love and understanding is appalling — and it’s happened by stealth as officers whose worldviews were shaped during the Clinton era acquiesced in the Bush administration’s insistence that wars could be won without annoying the enemy. When former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki — a model officer — tried to tell the truth and got sent to the permanent dugout, other senior officers sympathized. But they didn’t rush to defend him or argue for more troops themselves.

It’s now fashionable for journalists to praise Army generals and colonels who used a light touch in Iraq. While drinking tea with the local sheik is pleasant for the fly-by commander and visiting journalist alike, the problem is that the light touch has given us the disastrous situation we face today. The big-carrot-little-stick approach hasn’t worked enduringly anywhere in Iraq’s Arab provinces. Meanwhile, division commanders who were actually willing to fight were condemned by their peers. War was no longer a contest of wills but a contest to see who could deliver the most gifts (bribes, really) to hostile local populations. And, of course, insurgents, militias and corrupt chieftains will always be glad to escape adult supervision as they build up their numbers, arm, train and steal everything Uncle Sam meant to give them. In the Middle East, theft is honorable, but accepting a conqueror’s largesse is bad form.

With our light-touch operations, we bought transient “successes” at the cost of nurturing the killers who are now destroying Iraq. No city where we’ve touted our success could withstand the terrorists, insurgents and militias, were we to leave.

If we’ve forgotten the utility of killing, our enemies haven’t.

The Army’s knee-jerk, politically correct reaction to any suggestion that evil men need to be killed so that the innocent might prosper is the disingenuous statement that “you can’t just kill everybody,” as if the only alternative to uniformed pacifism is genocide. Anyway, our enemies are perfectly willing to try to “kill everybody” until they reach their goals.

In material terms, we remain by far the most powerful military on earth. In terms of strength of will or intellectual integrity, our enemies put us to shame. The terrorists are honest about their goals. We mumble platitudes and send our soldiers off to face more improvised explosive devices.

Originally, this column was going to dissect the deplorable Sept. 21 draft of FM 3-24, “Counterinsurgency” (MCWP 3-33.5 for the Marine Corps), which appeared to have been written by Bono, two Woodstock survivors and one disgruntled Vietnam vet. A guide to failure and the waste of American lives, the draft troubled me more than anything produced by the Army since I joined as a private in 1976. It broadly ignored our real enemies — religious zealots and ethnic supremacists — in favor of PC analysis that interprets all insurgencies as Maoist in nature. Not only is that absurd — the brief age of ideology is over and we’re now back in the historical mainstream of rebellions of blood and belief — but it’s willfully absurd. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the drafters insisted on the enduring validity of models with which they were comfortable, such as Malaya or the early years of Vietnam. They want to study head colds while the Black Death is raging.

With a skin-them-alive-and-gut-them critique already written, I was assured that corrective action is being taken to produce a more sensible final document. To give the garrison Army a chance to prove it can deliver doctrine that might actually help our soldiers in the field, I’m holding my fire. But when that finalized manual appears, let’s hope there’s at least a single mention of suicide bombers and a few words about religious zealots and ethnic supremacists (neither of whom were included in the draft’s categorization of insurgent types).

That Sept. 21 draft’s keystone chapter offers 12 lengthy paragraphs that deal with Maoist insurgencies and two — count ’em yourself — brief references to either Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida and other faith-fueled terrorist movements. The Bolshevik Revolution got equal treatment with two paragraphs (“Back to Vladivostok, Wolfhounds!”). Baghdad was mentioned only once, ranking our experience there as equal in importance to the example of Che Guevara (whom we probably will not be fighting in the near future).

The document’s misdiagnosis of the threat, faulty prescriptions and general incoherence appeared to result from drafters defending their doctoral theses, others who were prisoners of narrow educations and poor reading habits (T.E. Lawrence, an English neurotic who liked to dress up in flowing gowns and play spin-the-bottle with Bedouins, gets three citations in the keystone chapter and haunts the entire manual), and the pervasive atmosphere of political correctness that has conquered so much of our military and civilian leadership.

We’ve come a long, long way — downhill — since then-Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood wrote, almost a century ago, that “The purpose of an army is to fight.” According to that goofball here’s-why-we-need-FCS video and the draft of the counterinsurgency manual, the purpose of an army is to put Band-Aids on boo-boos.

Let’s all hope that the promised revisions to the manual will inject some intellectual integrity and sobriety — but, frankly, some is all we can hope for. Although the draft manual mentions the importance of understanding foreign cultures, it carefully avoids religion, which is the fundamental determinant of any culture: Men and women are what they believe.

Consider the difference in receptivity on the part of any population (except, for now, the most secular societies in Europe) to ideological and religious insurgent movements. A villager in country X may be convinced that Marxism or some other ideology offers him advantages, but his commitment isn’t pre-programmed and doesn’t go deep. A mere ideology can be undermined — a guiding principle of 20th-century counterinsurgency. But those who argue that Afghanistan has the characteristics of a Maoist insurgency are focusing on superficial techniques rather than on cultural predispositions: In an Islamic society, the villager or urban youth is already convinced that Islam is supremely good. The key issue is motivation, not tactics.

The apostle of an Islamo-fascist insurgency needs only to activate a disposition that already exists in a potential recruit, to portray the faith as under threat or betrayed and call the faithful to arms. And then you’ve got trouble in Kabul River City. Religious believers aren’t blank slates but potential sleeper-agents, every one. It’s virtually impossible to convince a man or woman anywhere that his or her religion is wrong. And, in the end, it comes down to what men are willing to die for: Faith tops the list, followed by blood ties as a close second. Ideology is way down the list and dropping.

You might convert a weary guerrilla in Latin America from Marxism to democracy and capitalism (or, at least, to narco-trafficking), but you can’t persuade an Arab to become Persian, or a Kurd to become Arab. Religious and ethnic insurgencies — which often overlap — are fundamentally different from and far tougher to defeat than ideological movements. Ideology is kid’s stuff. Blood and belief are the real things.

So why don’t we discuss religion — the most powerful motivational factor in human affairs — as an integral element of the security challenges we face? After all, our enemies insist that religion is dearer to them than all else — do we think they’re just making it up to put one over on us? Where are the Western atheist suicide bombers, by the way? In the draft counterterrorism manual, I found no mention of Islamist terrorism (of course, the document is so hopelessly long and poorly written that I didn’t read every word of every annex — length is the staff officer’s instinctive substitute for clarity and quality).

The reason religion has been ignored as a crucial strategic factor — not only by the Army but by intelligence agencies, as well — is that political correctness rules. The dread of discussing religion as a cause of merciless violence, then getting called on the carpet for insensitivity, is so great that one editor of an official military journal told me several months ago that he had been forbidden by his superior to publish any article that mentioned religion — at a time when we’re fighting Islamist terrorists and insurgents. Let’s be honest: The bottom line here is that an officer’s promotion has become more important than defeating our enemies.

How can we pretend to understand our opponents — or hope to defeat them — when we insist on ignoring the core of their being? Does anyone really believe that Osama bin Laden’s a Maoist?

Oh, and by the way, Mao didn’t invent his 12-step program for insurgencies. The drafters of that wrong-headed counterinsurgency manual appear to believe that history started in St. Petersburg (the cold one) in 1917. It didn’t. Mao drew his lessons from centuries of millenarian, agrarian rebellions in China and, directly, from the national-chiliastic uprisings of the Taipings and the Fists of Righteousness (the “Boxers”) in the 19th century. Maoist strategies weren’t invented on the spot but exploited the millenarian strain that haunted Chinese history. Those who want to tell our soldiers and Marines how to subdue our nation’s enemies should at least do their homework.

We’ll see how the final version of “Counterinsurgency” looks. I wish the drafters well. But they must break free of the prevailing atmosphere of political correctness and deal with the world as it is, not as the Give-Peace-a-Chance Generation — now politically and culturally dominant — wants it to be. The toughest challenge, of course, is that those who have internalized a PC view of the world often don’t even realize it. Instead of Chesty Puller or George Patton, we have generals who rely on lawyers. And they’re convinced they’re warriors.

As for the Army’s misguided campaign to sell Future Combat System with sleek videos so sterile they could be featured on the Cartoon Network, I walked away from that screening worried that our haste to get rid of artillery brigades — a decision that elevates supposed efficiency over guaranteed effectiveness — simply reflected our reluctance to inflict damage on our enemies. As a wary supporter of FCS, I want to know if, in a real war, it could flatten a city — destruction matters. In an all-or-nothing war, the capability to inflict massive devastation trumps precision. It’s not that we don’t need precision weapons — we need both smart bombs and the ability to render great swaths of a landscape unrecognizable — but graphic, tangible destruction is what ultimately breaks an enemy’s will.

When is the last time you heard a senior Army general talk about the need to destroy an enemy? Even those whom I admire speak in petticoat euphemisms. Are officers now afraid to speak plainly — or do they really believe in the myth of bloodless war? Is that the lesson of Iraq? That friendly persuasion brings peace and, as that draft manual would have it, less force is always more? Tell that to a soldier or Marine in a firefight.

How is it that officers who are lions on the battlefield turn to jelly inside the Beltway?

Our manuals should tell us how to defeat our enemies, not how to serve them hot milk at bedtime. Videos and other tools to promote FCS should illustrate how the system will devastate our opponents, not how we can spend tens of billions to save a wounded terrorist. Senior officials and generals must speak honestly about war and stop pretending that we can win today’s — and tomorrow’s — conflicts without fighting.

Politically correct leadership has killed 3,000 American troops in Iraq and wounded another 20,000. Now Iraq is nearly hopeless, thanks to military theorists who think that culling sound bites from “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” serves us better than clear thinking, common sense and fighting spirit.

It didn’t have to be that way. Our troops didn’t fail. Our national leadership did. And so did the generals.

Peace, sir.