Planning to Fight the Last War?

David Wood, the military correspondent for Politics Daily, expresses concern in his recent article, that US military strategists may be planning on fighting the previous war.  That is, a continuation of counterinsurgency operations.  Mr. Wood cautions us not to throw away those manuals on conventional warfare.  That in light of growing tension between the US and Iran, North Korea and maybe even China, we may need to fight an all out conventional war--if we can:

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/12/27/busy-with-afghanistan-the-u-s-military-has-no-time-to-train-fo/ 

This news item causes an extensive debate among my friends:

I think this will be the future story after the next war – why did the U.S. spend so much time on low intensity conflict and forget how to fight real wars? After all, I do not see any more nation-building sorts of interventions any time soon, but a war in Korea or with China is not beyond the realm of possibility.

I don't know. I can also imagine our entering into the fray in Mexico if we are able to extricate ourselves from Iraq and/or Afghanistan, and points further south aren't completely beyond the realm of possibilities either...

Perhaps, but I don't think we will have the political will to intervene on a massive scale (i.e. Iraq/AF). Mexico is a possibility, but I have my doubts about nation-building down south.
My take is that the costs of failure on the high-intensity end are tremendous, while the costs on the lower end are much lower (but not necessarily low).

Agreed...To get our asses handed to us by the norKs or the ChiComs would be disastrous, whereas a setback in a COIN/LIC is just that, a setback, and something we'll have time to recover from. Heck, we would still have the choice to escalate or withdraw. A buttkicking on the Peninsula would be forever.

If North Korea is the logic for having an army capable of fighting "big wars" you're scraping the bottom of the barrel. Defeating the North Korean Army is the South Korean Army's job, a job they are quite capable of doing.



Our contributions will be primarily air, naval, as well logistics and C4ISR.

"There's a belief that the president of the United States can pick up the red phone and order forcible entry operations'' like the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said Army Maj. Gen. Dan Bolger, who commands the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana. "But that takes practice, and we don't get a lot of practice.''

I find Bolger's comments interesting because he is the guy who in the early 1990s wrote the Parameters article - The Ghosts of Omdurman where he argued that the future was going to be geared toward low intensity conflict and that Desert Storm was an aberration.

Frankly, from a standpoint of future force structure, I find it very unlikely that we will be getting into a major force on force land conflict and beyond that after Iraq and Afghanistan I find unlikely that we'll be committing large numbers of ground low intensity conflicts. So, I know it is not a PC view right now because of the burden being carried by our ground forces but for future planning I think our air and naval forces should get priority.

I see the U.S. as back to our roots - maritime power is where we should focus in the mid-term (and that includes air). I agree that a ground war with China is highly unlikely, but I am not so sanguine about a war in Korea.

I'm not so sanguine about an all-out shooting war with North Korea either.