I tend to agree with Bill on this one. I certainly see your point, Ken, but I don't like the broad sweeping statements like war is war. Broadly that is certainly true. It is a conflict between two or more entities, but I think that when you don't define the type of war that you are in or preparing to be in ie COIN, LIC, conventional etc. you leave it up to the listener to decide what the term war means to them. I think that the problem then becomes less about making John Q. Public understand that there is no such thing as an easy war but that it becomes an issue of making commanders prepare for the war as it will be fought not the war as they would like it to be fought. The US military has always prepared for war pretty well. The problem is that it has not always prepared for the right war. I have no doubt that had twenty Russian Guards tank divisions come screaming out of the Fulda Gap that we would have taught them the error of their ways. Unfortunately, reality had other ideas and we have just not found the fight we were prepared for but by God we were going to keep preparing for it. As has been bemoaned many times on this board, this is hardly our first COIN fight but not so you could tell by how it went for the first couple of years or so. Ask any of the commanders what they have been doing since Vietnam and they will tell you that they have been training their men for war, just the wrong kind of war. I think that these other terms like LIC and COIN and conventional warfare, which all broadly fall under the definition of war but have different requirements, are needed in order help keep commanders focused.

There are a number of people now who are upset that we, as a military are so focused on COIN that we are letting our conventional warfare skills atrophy. I agree but I also believe that as soon as we are out of Iraq we will see a slow but steady shift in the other direction and eventually we will be back to the status quo, COIN is SF's problem, we fight the conventional fight, and we will go back to spending the majority of our resources and time preparing to fight a peer competitor threat that may not even realistically exist. Currently there is not one. Russia is rebuilding but that is going to take a long time. China lacks any real force projection capability and seems to be enjoying here growing economic power. The ROK army will Kim Jong Il's lunch if he tries to bow up. And Iran wouldn't likely be a conventional fight. I suspect it would be a repeat of Iraq with the part of insurgent being played by a professional army with much better equipment.

SFC W