... He issued the call about halfway into the speech, when he noted that future wars will be more like Iraq and Afghanistan—"asymmetric" conflicts that don't play into the American military's traditional prowess for large-scale, head-to-head combat...
To the civilian newspaper reader, this may seem a passage of dry common sense. But to an Army insider, it's practically a declaration of bureaucratic war.
The heart of the establishment Army is the tank and infantry corps. Its key mission is high-intensity, open-field combat against an enemy army of comparable capability.
Yet here was the secretary of defense saying that this kind of warfare isn't likely to recur any time soon. More than that, he was proposing that the Army move away from the mission of fighting any kind of war. Here was the hair-raising line:
[A]rguably the most important military component in the War on Terror is not the fighting we do ourselves, but how well we enable and empower our partners to defend and govern their own countries. The standing up and mentoring of indigenous armies and police—once the province of Special Forces—is now a key mission for the military as a whole.
Granted, Gates did not say "the War on Terror" is the only war that the Army has to gear up for. One of the Army's "principal challenges," he said, "is to regain its traditional edge of fighting conventional wars while retaining what it has learned and relearned about unconventional wars." But then, he added that these unconventional wars are "the ones most likely to be fought in the years ahead." ...
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