I'd like to highlight this SWJ Blog on a lecture given by General Sir Richard Danatt of the British General Staff. What Danatt gets at here is extremely important for discussions of future national security:
"We can no longer be prescriptive about taking part in either Major Combat Operations or Stabilisation Operations, the boundary between them has become increasingly blurred – the antithesis of the beloved binary response. I cannot envisage a conflict where there will be no role for stabilisation operations, but equally stabilisation is highly likely to involve combat as it does today. But more importantly the Army does not subscribe to the view that major combat operations are a thing of the past."
Danatt goes on to argue that that those espousing such views will find themselves imperiled when the big guns begin to fire again. This point extremely important---we may not be able to completely predict what form future wars will take, but interstate conflict is not something that will die away when there's a McDonald's on the moon.
The problem for policymakers though, is how to construct and train a force capable of both missions. As Thomas K. Adams persuasively argued in The Army After Next, the idea of a one-size-fits-all force is a dangerous chimera. So the conflict between irregular warfare advocates and more cautious conventional warriors will continue whatever the ultimate outcome of Iraq and Afghanistan.
For the irregular warriors, America's struggles in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other "Small Wars" is the fault of a hidebound military establishment that prized orthodoxy and big weapons systems over cultural knowledge and political strategy. But the conventional advocates have an equally compelling historical narrative: Britain and France's focus on colonial policing missions and belief that markets and institutions would constrain nationalism caused their armies to lose knowledge of higher warfare and blunder into World War I's bloodbath.
if anything is clear, it is that national security policymakers in the next administration will have to make many complex--and fear reaching--decisions about how American forces should be organized to combat both today and tomorrow's threats. However, the temptation to continue the status quo and avoid making any big (and potentially controversial) decisions might prove overwhelming.
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