In Making Iraq Too Nice for the Devil, Michael Fumento, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and a former Army paratrooper, describes the low quality of some of the insurgent attacks in Iraq:
I watched a video of an attack on a Falluja police station with a surrounding wall. The tape had fallen into coalition hands when the cameraman dropped his equipment and ran. The video depicted one bad guy firing an RPG while running, making the odds of hitting the target slightly less than zero. Another was too scared to take the safety off his RPG and just stood there looking like an idiot.Another fired his light machine gun at a wall directly in front of him, while yet another kept tripping over the ammo belt that dangled from his weapon and dragged on the ground. Others simply held their weapons above their head and fired over the wall.
It requires a shocking amount of training and discipline to get ordinary men to fight like professional soldiers — to take any personal risk at all, to aim at a specific target and try to hit it, etc.