... One particularly prophetic series of games exercised plans that took down a "particular" nation's nuclear-weapons capability without a traditional land invasion. In these games, aero-mechanized brigades established a series of temporary enclaves surrounding enemy WMD sites and held the enemy at bay until all of his weapons were systematically (and bloodlessly) located and completely destroyed by ground forces. We knew then that aero-mechanized maneuver would work. It would change the entire course of modern war. All we needed was a defense establishment that believed as passionately as we did in the concept.
We were pretty much ignored. Since the first Bush administration the consistent message was that future wars would be won with "shock and awe." Kill enough of them from the air and the war would be cheaply won, at least for our side.
Budgets reflected this love affair with aerial killing. Since Gen. Huba's first exposition in the early 1990s, 70 percent of defense investments, more than $1.3 trillion, have gone into shock and awe, delivered by Air Force and Navy aircraft and missiles.
The Army got 16 percent. Thus, we come today to an amazingly perverse strategic circumstance. We have more first-line fighter aircraft costing $50 million to $400 million per copy than we have Army and Marine infantry squads, costing less than $100,000 each.
Since Gen. Huba's experiments began, we have achieved a "kill ratio" in aerial combat of 257 to one over enemy air forces. In the second battle of Fallujah that ratio for Marine and Army soldiers was, at best, six or seven to one. Why? Because in large measure our soldiers and Marines had to assault those buildings in Fallujah on foot, virtually unprotected, just as their grandfathers did in World War II.
So here we are trying to find a way to rid Iran of its nuclear weapons and the only warfighting tool in the tool box is shock and awe. Simply put, there is no ground option. We have too few soldiers to fight the wars we have, much less take on another enemy. Even if we had the ground forces, without an aerial maneuver option we could never hope to reach Iran's nuclear facilities by a ground invasion. So we'll blow them all up with bombs. Right...
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