Reed posted: If you look at the win-loss ratio of airborne ops, and consider the amount of pyric victories, large scale airborne operations rarely make much sense. I am a paratrooper, and I still feel that actual airborne ops should really be limited to reconn, raids and airfield siezures. I feel it is more important to be capable when you arrive, then to arrive quickly. Want expiditionary warfare? Buy sealift, not planes. Intelligent unit sizing and rotational readyness would do more for our ability to quickly project force globaly then light airborne armor would.
I have been following this thread with some interest.

Your post, Reed, captures the issue that the Army seeming has been grappling with since 1991/2 very well (and it touches on an important issue related to my research on mil change in the US Army). It does relate at least obliquely to the thread, but if this is well off topic, my apologies.

The issue is/was that the US Army found itself in the 1990s, to use my irreverent colloquialism, ‘too light to fight, too fat to fly’, and this has been a driving concern – if not always obvious - since the first Gulf War behind the movement towards the Objective/Future force concept and, to a lesser extent, Modularization.

As everyone remembers, the US' initial 'rapid response' to the Iraq invasion of Kuwait was to deploy the 82nd Airborne to Saudi and there was concern at the time that should the 3 Iraqi divisions on the Kuwait/Saudi border drive south that the 82nd Airborne would be little more than a ‘speed bump’. (As an ignorant outsider this seemed a bit of an overstatement to me - think airpower support but then I am easily ). By contrast, to deploy armour divisions took many months, until Oct 91 for a ‘defensive’ force and Feb/March for an offensive force. Gen Sullivan (and others ) recognized that the US was moving into an era of expeditionary ops and was concerned about the future role of the Army due to this problem. So he instigated a process of thinking through how deal with it (and other issues) through the New Louisiana Maneuvers Experiments and then the Army After Next concept studies (and the Force XXI plays at the margins vice C2 for smaller sized units that the AAN was playing with conceptually).

The same problem emerges in Kosovo. Reportedly, the US considered inserting the 82nd Airborne into Kosovo very early but decided against doing so out of concern that the Serb military would go after them with deadly consequences for the 82nd (too light…) In contrast – again – was Task Force Hawk which demonstrated again the logistics/deployability problem (too fat...). TF Hawk was embarrassing for the Army and of course spurred Gen. Shinseki to take the bull by the horns and start the process of developing the Objective/Future force with its very tight deadlines for deployment into theatre and for combat readiness once on the ground (essentially arrive combat ready and capable). In other words, to be irreverent again, the FCS is supposed to be ‘fat enough to fight, light enough to fly’.

So Reed's observations - as well as others - seems to me be quite relevant given the current development problems with the FCS system (or ‘system of systems’, if you will ) and underscores the problem the US Army still faces in becoming an 'expeditionary force' capable of a rapid response with combat capable forces (and I acknowledge that 'combat capable' may or even likely depend on the 'enemy' to be faced). Clearly finding a solution to the problem - if one thinks it is a problem - is very difficult.

Anyway, thank you all for your comments on the thread, for they all have helped me make more sense of the issue/problem, thereby lifting a little bit of my fog of ignorance.