Acting okay; screenplay and editing must be the issue

Rating: 3/10 (1 January 2010)

I had no problem with the acting, and the directing was fine. My issue is with the editing and/or the screenplay.
The scenes appear random and often have no context. The 05, played by David Morse, comes on as hooah (look it up), and then doesn't appear in the movie again. It was almost as if they had paid a great deal of money for his acting and needed to use something with him in it to justify it (and maybe get a screen credit for him). The entire set of shots related to locating the boy (kidnapping, professor's house, running the streets, main gate) were useless. It was 5 minutes of my life that I'll never get back and it resulted in no added value to the movie. What happened to the child that had the body bomb? There could have been a lot better use of time in the movie to show the disparity of civilian life vs. the adrenaline of war, but 30 seconds in a cereal aisle doesn't do it for me.
I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for a lot of things (I still love Willie Wonka), but to believe that EOD can pick up a .50 cal rifle and operate as a sniper team...I'd rather believe that little men make chocolate (the snosberries don't always taste like snosberries). I'll forgive the uniform issues, but in the end, there were just too many things for me to forgive. I found myself wanting Samuel L. Jackson or Tommy Lee Jones to pop up and take the movie somewhere I could lay my disbelief for a little while.
I've read in some reviews that this is the best war movie in many, many years. If that's so we're in a lot of trouble. I've walked out of only 2 movies - Break Dancing and some other movie that was so bad I can't even remember the title. I wanted to walk out of this one, but more so I wanted the movie to give me something it didn't have to give - context and entertainment.