I agree whole heartedly with your main point but I'd say militaries are more likely to overreact to the last war. "Generals are always fighting the last war" is a quote I heard from long ago and it seems to match up. In Desert Storm it was clear that the lessons of not getting entangled a la Vietnam were clearly in mind. When I went in to Bosnia it was clear Somalia was in mind as our RoE basically said if we were being being fired up on by someone using civilians as a shield to "aim carefully", and I keep hearing mention that the US is still trying to shift away from GWOT even though it's been 10 years since that started slowing down.