the problem is a basic conflict of interest. You can't very will spend billions standing up a force and then turn around and tell the guy visiting from DIA - "yeah - they're going to dissolve into thin air the minute we are gone." That ain't gonna happen! 😉
So it's almost inevitable our client armies will always be relatively overestimated. Actually I suppose the Iraqi army by now has maybe, sort of, almost, turned into a real independent operating force. And if you could somehow expunge 15+ years of the history and jump right from Saddam to today, you could argue Iraq is better off than it was in 1995 in terms of more or less being able to take care of itself and being a less despotic place despite the level of political chaos and even if it doesn't look much like anything Paul Wolfowitz or even Ahmed Chalabi ever envisioned.