Quote Originally Posted by Eden View Post
It's hard to disagree that we should train for the next war, not the last, but I have very little faith that we (and by that I mean TRADOC) will be able to divine just where and when we will fight the next war...
That's the point -- we cannot, therefor we have to be prepared to operate in all spectrums. If there is excessive concentrarion on the last, then something will generally be omitted that is applicable to the next one as I'll show below.

...Maybe I just traveled in the wrong crowd, but I don't remember anybody in 2000 suggesting it was time to start training for counterinsurgency in Iraq...
The issue is not what was done in 2000. The issue is that the Army deliberately downplayed and tried to ignore COIN and nationbuilding after Viet Nam because they concentrated on THAT war and did not want to do that again.
In fact, do a little thought experiment. Starting in 1900, imagine how likely it was that we would properly envision the next war, or set of wars, as we planned out the next two decades of training for the Army.
Your list in italics

1900 - Next US War after the recent unpleasentness in the Philippines will be a major conventional war on the continent of Europe.

Exactly. And the Army which had for years been training at distributed operations and had only one division levle exercise took excessive casualties in France due to that lack of focus on mass.

1920 - Next US War will be a virtual repeat of the recent major conventional war, with the Pacific thrown in for good measure. Oh, and the Army will need to become expert at amphibious operations.

Actually, it was the Marine Corps who foresaw the phib problem and the Army's concentration on WW I tactics and techniques caused a lot of excess casualties in Norht Africa and in Sicily. an Army that had trained for the static warfare of WW I found itslef fighting a mobile, fasst paced war and it did not do that well. Armies who don't do things well always suffer excessive casualties.

1940 - OK, this one is an exception - or is it? Who would have forseen after WWII that our next war would be a limited one on the Asian continent?

No one and that again is the point...

1960 - 500,000 men need to be trained on semi-conventional counterinsurgent warfare.

Yet an Army trained for your previous item as well as the next item went to SE Asia and tried to fight a land war in Europe while stuck in Rice paddies...

1980 - Our next opponents will be the Sov...oh, several insignificant Latin American countries.

Yes on the Soviets but being in the Army then, I recall absolutely no concern with Latin America other than for a few SF types.

1990 - Coming up, we get a chance to employ all those wonderful tanks after all!

Yes, we did -- and got lulled into thinking the next one would be similar. It was not...

"Prepare for the next war, not the last" is one of those true but useless aphorisms. Unless our prognostication skills radically improve, preparing for the last war will be just as useful as preparing for what we imagine the next might look like.
Partly correct -- the real requirement is to prepare to fight a war; that's what Armies get paid for. Preparing for the next war is rarely possible because one rarely knows where and what it will be. Being fully prepared to fight the next war, whatever and where ever it is, is an entirely different thing -- and is always going to be more promising than preparing to fight a repeat of the last.

By the way, I have "major conventional war in Europe" in the office pool.
If that's a pool on the next, I expect you'll lose...