Conservative Max Boot has a complaint about the U.S. military under Secretary Mattis:
After the Vietnam War, the U.S. military deliberately set out to forget everything it had learned about the brutal and unpleasant business of fighting guerrillas. The generals were operating under the assumption that if they didn’t prepare for that kind of war, they wouldn’t be asked to fight it. The emphasis in the 1980s and 1990s, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was on fighting conventional, uniformed adversaries. That worked out well in the 1991 Gulf War but left the U.S. armed forces tragically ill prepared for the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I thought the military did reasonably well in the initial attacks on the two countries, but were asked to then rebuild nations, not something the military should be doing. But anyways, the following interested me more:
Countries such as Sweden and Italy are working to combat Russian election interference by educating citizens about “fake news” and closing loopholes that hackers can exploit. (Even so, pro-Russian populists won the recent Italian election.) But Adm. Michael S. Rogers, outgoing head of U.S. Cyber Command, told Congress that he hasn’t been granted enough authorities to fight back against the Kremlin’s meddling and that the Russians “haven’t paid a price . . . that’s sufficient to get them to change their behavior.”
Generals are often accused of fighting the last war. Actually, they are more likely to prepare for a future war that never arrives while neglecting a current conflict. The Pentagon will be repeating that mistake if it focuses its energy on conventional wars rather than the hybrid threat. In fairness, that’s not all Mattis’s fault. Combating hybrid warfare requires extensive civilian-military cooperation. But it’s hard to fight a war when the foremost beneficiary of the enemy’s attack is the commander in chief.
I wonder if Max has considered the possibility that, by preparing for the war that never arrived, the US Military was actually successful. I’ve mentioned the fleet in being concept before, so I’ll just quote myself:
… where the very existence of a force, even if not deployed, modifies the behavior of the adversary.
Adversaries thinking to engage in conflict with us come to the realization that the United States is prepared for conflict in one mode, and therefore, and quite logically, abandon that mode themselves, seeing as we can generally out-resource just about anyone not named China. I’m no United States defense expert, so I can only guess that Mattis felt that we’d been neglecting our conventional capabilities and didn’t want to tempt someone into taking a shot at us, so he at least says that aspect of defense needs beefing up. It’s a signal: Don’t fuck with us, our conventional forces will be ready.
The question then becomes whether or not Max’s hybrid war preparations are being abandoned, or simply advanced without fanfare.
