Perhaps a brief story will elucidate on what I mean.
The person who runs the medieval fencing class I attend is a veteran. Not anything spectacular, but still, combat infantry. Now, it is his belief - I do not know why - that bar fights are fun. So whenever he goes to Russia to visit his friends and relatives, he makes it a point to get into a fight.
Last time he was there, he managed to get himself attacked by three fellows. One of them, his friends dealt with, and two, he beat up and they ran off. Now, why is that story instructive? Not because this specific individual is John Rambo - but because he isn't.
Consider a tough bar fighter in a country like Russia. Now he's seen some moves, and he's been doing this for two or three years. He probably has some good instinct, and maybe his older brother showed him some good moves when he was twelve. If he were to fight me, he'd clock me in the face few times and then stomp on my body when I fell. But two of these guys got their butt kicked by a guy who did IDF enlisted service. Why? Because the guy studied a real, military martial art. That art had been developed for him by scientists and sports professionals over the course of several years, and then the process of TEACHING the art to him was developed by professionals in the sports and education field.
An Afghani terrorist is not unlike this bar fighter. His Dad taught him a few tricks from fighting the Russians, and maybe he's gone to an Al-Quaeda training camp or something. Maybe not.
When he goes up against an American, German, or any other allied soldier, he's going up against an entirely other league of fellow. A fellow whose entire system of training - from navigation to small arms combat - is worked out scientifically. The choice of equipment he carries, even the weight of his combat gear is the product of some eggheads researching into ortopedics, optics, medicine, engineering, ergonomics, ballistics, nuclear physics, materials science, tactics, military history, psychology, education. The fact his gun is better, his optics are shinier, whatever - is a product of the fact that our civilization handles KNOWLEDGE better.
It is only in the imagination of small-minded men that being civilized makes us softer and weaker. Being civilized has allowed us to produce the hardest combatants the world has ever known: soldiers who grab armed terrorists and throw them on the terrorists' own grenades, soldiers who can fight - in close combat, using only knives and shovels - against a numerically-exceeding horde of terrorists, and then stab and hack them to death with almost no casualties. Every United States Marine, every Israeli paratrooper, every Russian VDV paratrooper fighting against Wahabbis would - by the standards of ancient Greece, the middle ages, the 17th century - be taken as an incredible hero of epic legend.
And unlike any of these pitiful worthless 'tards whom we call 'terrorists', we can produce these men as a routine process. More, we have more of these men than any of these cultures can produce fighting men at all.
And now think of the equipment we produce for these men. Every single one of the inventions I will list now are not merely 'cool' - each of them individually is a revolution in armed combat. Equipping your men with Trijicon scopes increases their capability as combat marksmen by 100% on average. Equipping your military with electronic, live-updating C3 systems makes it possible to coordinate disparate units by the click of a button where a lesser organization would resort to long radio exchanges on all levels, or even (in the case of some terrorist groups) runners. And then there are the more obvious things - guided munitions, UAVs, combat robots, etc.
The Afghani are many things, but they do learn. Every time a platoon of Marines takes down a company of Al Quaeda, they see and they learn. And for the Americans, the Germans, the British - these sort of victories are not even the stuff of legend. For them it is something they do routinely.
