Quote Originally Posted by Tacitus View Post
But back to the topic, at hand. I have a question. Assuming Iraq is an aberration, and you are preferring instead to focus on conventional war with rising powers like China. What would that change about how the U.S. armed forces looked before we invaded Iraq? How do you plan to organize, outfit, and conduct a war with China, even if is a conventional only fight?
I am not advocating a focus on conventional war. I do believe that we will continue to face situations that will require COIN skills, including regime change, humanitarian efforts that go awry, etc. However, I do not think we can focus on COIN skills to the exclusion of our conventional advantage.

We have clearly mastered conventional war and I believe we can master COIN as well. However, I sense an undercurrent of doubt when it comes to preparing for a peer competitor in many things I've read. If our enemy (whomever it may be in the future) seeks to capitalize on our weakness, are we doing him a favor by overly focusing on COIN to the detriment of conventional capabilities? Rather than assuming the next war (or some future war rather than the very next one) will be like Iraq, or Korea, or WWII, couldn't it be a blend of the two? And if this scenario is realistic, should we be capable of fighting both types of war simultaneously?

Maybe this line of thinking is way off-track, but I can't help but notice that most of what I read falls into one camp or another. If I'm not making sense, my apologies.