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Has Our Military Lost the Ability to Fight Traditional Wars?

James Joyner: [1]

Thomas Ricks [2] reports that Matt Matthews, a historian at the Army’s Combat Studies Institute, has written a new report concluding that “five years of fighting insurgents in Iraq may also have dulled U.S. soldiers’ skills at more conventional combat.”

The study, apparently, isn’t a case study of the U.S. military but rather the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war and Israel’s woeful performance.

The fight at Wadi Saluki, for example, revealed the failure of tank commanders and crewmen to use their smokescreen systems, the lack of indirect fire skills, and the total absence of combined arms proficiency. The IDF lost many of these perishable skills during its long years of COIN [counterinsurgency] operations against the Palestinians.

[…]

While the U.S. Army continues to perform irregular warfare operations throughout the world, it must not lose its ability to execute major combat operations.

Well, a couple points:

First, I’m not convinced there is what we are pleased to call a ‘conventional war’ on our horizon. There’s nobody at this stage with the military strength to wage such a war against us, who actually would do so. Those with enough strength to do so, would undoubtedly use Nuclear weapons, instead. China leaps to mind.  Those without the strength to do so… say, the Islamist Extremists, for example, would use the kind of insurgency we’re seeing now.

Seondly, I submit that part of the reason those traditional skills have atrophied is because so much of our training, anymore centers not on fighting skills but on keeping the military trained as a ‘meals on wheels’, and on being subordinate to the so called United Nations.

That was considered a good trade, back in the day, because those directing such operations always assumed that with such training and such actions in place, we’d never have to go to war with one another again. And no, those words are not idly chosen.