Check this month's The American Interest for a buffet of all the military defense articles you can possibly eat. Just make sure to get enough butter with your guns. OK, that was a poor attempt at Econ 101 humor. More substantively, Richard A. Lacquement Jr. has an interesting look in AI at the neverending COIN vs. Conventional debate.
The second paragraph, though, bears some repeating:
The Army has adapted well [to post-Cold War threats]. It has radically reorganized its force structure, shifting from an emphasis on large division formations and conventional combat to smaller formations centered on brigades with component modules more easily tailored to a variety of contingencies. The Army has also thoroughly reworked its doctrinal and intellectual foundations to incorporate counterinsurgency and stability operations on par with traditional combat operations in a comprehensive framework known as 'full spectrum operations.' It is more nimble than ever, and it certainly contemplates the future far less narrowly than it did a generation ago.
It's pretty common to hear laments about the problem of reorienting the military and the slow change of industrial bureaucracies. Most defense bloggers (certainly me too) have complained. But, if we look in the long view from the heights of 1980s preparation for giant conventional clashes and AirLand-Battle, the Army has been able to, at the very minimum, provide flexible options for all kinds of contingencies for at least twenty years.
I'm currently reading a TRADOC monograph about the process of revising FM 100-5 in 1993, and the doctrinal debate about how to adjust force structure and operational art to a post-Cold War world back then is just as fascinating as anything that occurs today in the pages of military and defense journals today.
That doesn't mean, of course, that there aren't deeper strategic problems with our defense debate and structure, but those problems have very deep roots. Don Vandergriff, for example, points out frequently in his writings that late 19th-century personnel reforms and structures have in many cases set the stage for today's problems.
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