On the officers thing: apparently (again according to Generation Kill) the typical First Recon mission is given to a four- or five-man patrol led by an NCO, and the officers stay in the rear doing analysis. In Iraq, they were doing something totally different: driving around in Humvees as a large formation. Some of the officers were Afghanistan vets or otherwise clued-up, but some seem to have been seriously out of their depth.

Interestingly, the SAS also use the "small patrol led by an NCO" structure, as seen in Bravo Two Zero, but AIUI they require all their officers to go through the same Selection and training as the enlisted men - probably to avoid exactly this problem...