Slap,

I feel, and it has been posited elsewhere, that America has the capability to be prepared for war fought on virtually any level of intensity or effort. Where we trip ourselves up is our acquisitions process is heavily geared towards equipping the force for war as we want it to happen, vice trying to achieve a balance of capabilities that can effectively deal with a broad and fluid range of employment. We seem to strive to have the highest speed, lowest drag widget. That superiority comes at a very high cost, and to what end?

One cannot 100% predict the future and it seems that many in government naively believe our opponents will fight on our terms. Granted, there are those that argue that having the absolute top of the line weapon systems deters our enemies. I agree that is true for some, but it will not deter them all, and those who are willing to take us on will make every effort to determine ways to either match or mitigate the superiority of our weapons or create scenarios in which they are irrelevant or impractical due to their complexity or lethality (our self imposed aversion to non-combatant casualties will always be a weapon to be used against us by less scrupulous opponents).

The US primarily should be highly proficient at employing forces to combat a peer like enemy because nearly all those proficiencies are still relevant when you are at war with men in sandals with AKs and RPGs. It’s mostly about the judicious and appropriate application of those proficiencies for each scenario, scenarios which will vary even within the same AO.