When Army Lt. Col. Paul Yingling recently published “A Failure of Generalship” in the Armed Forces Journal, a tipping point was reached in the long-brewing fight between the U.S. military’s “big war” and “small wars” factions.

The big-war crowd wants to write off Iraq as an aberration, preferring instead to focus on conventional war with rising powers like China. The small-wars faction envisions a future in which messy insurgencies are the norm.

The initial clash naturally involves issuing blame for Iraq because, from that dominant strategic narrative, all future ones must flow. Yingling’s small-wars faction points accusingly to a generation of senior officers who should have logically foreseen the emergence of such intra-national warfare as the primary threat to global stability in the post-Cold War era. All the signs were there, including a plethora of U.S. military interventions across the 1990s that involved such conflict.
Thomas P.M. Barnett - Army America needs versus the wars Americans prefer to wage