COIN v. Conventional Capability Debate

[Entropy]

Seems to me that procurement is the big elephant in the room. I saw General Sir Rupert Smith speak last year, and while it was a good talk, he repeatedly said "I'm not here to talk about equipment, it is how that equipment is used that has changed", which struck me as evasive. Ultimately, with a finite amount of money to spend (and maybe less and less, the financial shape we're in) choices need to be made. Not to turn this into another F-22 thread, but we can't invest in more light infantry, and spend a lot more on recruiting, retention, professional military education, etc., if we're buying tons of new fighter planes and destroyers at hundreds of millions of dollars a pop.

Procurement, especially WRT the long lead and development timelines for new equipment, is certainly an issue. But so is the AVF. Even if most procurement money was diverted into manpower, recruiting, etc., how much more manpower could be raised? So far it looks like the Army will have trouble meeting the modest end strength increases it's received. Is it even possible to recruit the manpower we'd like to have for Iraq and Afghanistan - perhaps double the force we have now?

Furthermore, we must consider the scale of conflict. We need a COIN capability obviously, but how much do we need? Enough for another large Iraq-style operation or something smaller? Those kind of questions are what underpin the capability requirements in QDR's which determines where the money goes, etc. Personally, I see "small wars" being more the norm in the future, but I think it will be a generation or more before we do something like Iraq again which is a "small war" in name only.

[Granite_State]

Procurement, especially WRT the long lead and development timelines for new equipment, is certainly an issue. But so is the AVF. Even if most procurement money was diverted into manpower, recruiting, etc., how much more manpower could be raised? So far it looks like the Army will have trouble meeting the modest end strength increases it's received. Is it even possible to recruit the manpower we'd like to have for Iraq and Afghanistan - perhaps double the force we have now?

Furthermore, we must consider the scale of conflict. We need a COIN capability obviously, but how much do we need? Enough for another large Iraq-style operation or something smaller? Those kind of questions are what underpin the capability requirements in QDR's which determines where the money goes, etc. Personally, I see "small wars" being more the norm in the future, but I think it will be a generation or more before we do something like Iraq again which is a "small war" in name only.

Absolutely, I think increasing the armed forces, especially given demographic and economic considerations, will be really hard. And in regard to your second paragraph, I used to believe the standard line, "we don't have enough ground troops, Bush/Rumsfeld should have made the Army much bigger after 9/11, etc.", but recently read an article Steve Metz co-wrote a few months ago, where he talked about how we shouldn't be basing our manpower needs on Iraq and Afghanistan, which are probably anomalous, we need to craft a grand strategy which suits our advantages. Really opened my eyes.

Still, if we're spending hundreds of billions on FCS, F-22, and other platforms, even much more meager funding for small wars specifics is going to be hard to come by. Not to mention, I'd tend to think that a service built around these super expensive, high tech platforms, and needing to justify them to Congress and itself, is going to be a service that plans its warfighting and service cultures around them (Air Force resistance to CAS, Big Army still in Fulda Gap mode).