Quote Originally Posted by Ski View Post

3. As Field Marshall Nigel Bagnell stated, "over the centuries identifying a nation's future strategic priorities has proved to be a very imprecise art, and as a result peacetime force structures have seldom proved relevant when put to the test of war."
I began reading this 2001 book on defense budgets and force structure, Holding the Line, edited by Cindy Williams (currently at MIT, formerly in a high-level position at the Congressional Budget Office.) It is a compilation of the conventional wisdom regarding defense planning for the 2000-2010 period as it was viewed at that time. It seems so incredibly dated, hard to believe it's merely a decade old: the main worry was that the coming 4 trillion budget surplus may mean defense spending would rise over the 2000 level of $300 billion that DoD anticipated for the next five years. The military was said to be worried that in addition to being able to sustain one conventional Major Theater War AND multiple "lesser contingencies" (stability and peacekeeping operations, you know, stuff that doesn't require much attention in terms of dedicated resources), it may not have enough available forces for a SECOND conventional Major Theater War. No talk whatsoever of CT or COIN or irregular warfare, although the contributors (civilian and military professionals alike) proclaim with certitude that they are offering the solutions to move the military form Cold War structure to what's required in the 21st century. The recommendations suggested further cuts in structure, on the grounds that we only really need to win one MTW and do lesser interventions (by which I take to mean everything that's not MTW), so the capabilities for a potential second war could be eliminated. And our "likely" adversaries are so weak that we would surely have some overmatch left anyway, given our technological supremacy.

Thinking about how people who are kind of doing studying and writing about this stuff for a living could be proven so "wrong" (if that's the right word) over such a short period of time, I was left with a renewed appreciation for humbleness and flexibility in all efforts to design the "necessary" forces for coming wars. I fully understand why Ski and Ken talk about too much "creating and changing force structure." Constant reform and adaptation are obviously needed as threats evolve and enemies change, but I'm almost coming to believe that there are some hidden virtues in the much-maligned bureaucratic resistance to changing the way the military works.