Quote Originally Posted by tequila View Post
I'd argue for two main reasons. Historically the Army's status while fighting those small wars has not been a high one. Those wars (Banana Wars, Plains Indians Wars, Philippine insurrection) were generally not looked on as major national priorities and the Army was treated as such. Only when the nation felt a genuine threat (WWI, WWII, Civil War, Cold War) did the armed forces rise in both social and economic status. Upon achieving institutional prominence, normal institutional and bureaucratic preservation factors kick in. Few bureaucracies are are willingly downsized.

Also, those wars arguably did not constitute major investments of national interest. The nation would not have suffered unduly if the Banana Wars had never been fought or won, or if Dewey had handed Aguinaldo independence in 1899. Arguably the Army is not like any other government service - it is the government's ultimate insurance policy, and as such should prepare first and foremost for the ultimate emergency - a war for national survival, which will always be a big, conventional war and not a tiny foreign insurgency.
What struck me about this article and this line in particular is that I have heard it before. As a CGSC student (and former CSI-CGSC instructor) in 1988, I was fresh back from Lebanon and Egypt as a UN observer who had just lost 2 close friends. I signed up to do a second masters using Shaba II as a thesis and one of my thesis readers was Dr. Gerald Linderman--the guest historian at CSI that school year. I had already written LP 14 on the 64 Congo Crisis and Jerry Linderman had been a young foreign service officer in the Embassy in Leopoldville during that time. But as the guest historian, Jerry gave a guest lecture one evening on the future of the US Army and he used the pax-Americana metaphor to describe the probable role of the US armed forces in the conflicts to come. Then as now, there were those in the audience who not only did not get the message, they actively disputed its meaning.

Foreman's article is head and shoulders above Gentile's.

Thanks for the tip, Rob!

Dave and Bill--we need Foreman on SWJ!

Tom