Whole article is the age old issue of Americans refusing to confront their insecurities. Like it's a fucking cliche how the whole thing reads. Guy joins Navy thinking its easy but realizes he's a pussy for not being a hard man when he sees these tough as nails cold as ice marines. So to prove that he's no longer "bitch made", he decides that the next step is to join said marines, and then look some guy in the eye and kill him because someone said he's the bad guy.

Instead he gets to drone them, and goes home to cry to his girlfriend, who probably checked out while he was away. Then he dresses up all the insecurities by writing an WaPo opinion piece to tell us that if he could've, he would've, but they didn't let him. So now the course of the war was changed because he was remote instead of on the ground. You can see this with how many times he needs to tell us the Afghan army folded like wet tissue, as if supercop here would've been able to affect that.

Honestly it's an astonishing display of hubris and insecurity