This article reinforces my belief that the US military is about to make a mistake by returning to a total emphasis on high intensity conflict (HIC) with the misguided belief that a military trained for HIC can easily be retrained for COIN.

Beyond the somewhat obvious fact that there is no near peer competitor that the US military needs to be prepared to fight, the reality is that small, intrastate wars with a decidedly political slant are more likely to be the type of fight the American civilian leadership will get us in - largely because internal fights that are believed to be (or can be packaged as) wars of democratic liberation and expansion of liberties are the kind of wars the American public will support. We hate dictators and we feel drawn to these fights - it is our duty as the world’s first modern democracy to support others who want to be free.

So the problem is that at least some portion of our military is not organized, equipped, or trained to do this kind of work. We depend on civilians to do too much, particularly since civilians are not willing to join the fight. A military trained and equipped for HIC is not organized or trained to do COIN. Add to this that neither the military nor the civilians are trained to see the world through the eyes of the locals. They will consistently attempt to force American solutions to local problems. What is needed is an expeditionary force that is designed and resourced to conduct these operations. But that is a pipe dream. So I guess I will just wait till the next time we screw things up and attempt to argue that that future war was different from Afghanistan or Vietnam.