ARTICLE: Can US Still Fight a 'Big-battle' War?, McClatchy Newspapers, September 16, 2008

Pike falls into the same category as Bacevich: they don't want a SysAdmin force because it will be used. If we keep the capacity stillborn, then we can focus on just fighting wars and losing the peace (which, in their mind either doesn't matter or shouldn't be sought in the first place through military intervention).

Here is the missing piece to this argument: America can impose its big-war willpower nicely with air power and air power alone. If we're not going to own the aftermath, then we can just bomb, bomb, bomb and not care about what comes next. I can do that with air assets from Navy and Air Force. If I'm not going to put my ground forces at risk in small wars, why the hell would I put them at maximal risk in big ones?

This is a diversionary argument. We are not fighting major land wars in Asia (f--king duh!) against Russia (which doesn't have the bodies), nor China and India (not as stupid as we often assume them to be). If we are going to fight high-end, then it'll be missiles and drones and high-altitude bombers and guided this and that. It will not be the Marines storming some beach en masse, nor Normandy with the Army.

In short, we can have our SysAdmin green force and use it too, while maintaining an appropriate lead in the blue Leviathan force. This is not as hard as Pike and Bacevich make it out to be. Again, their arguments are essentially trojan horse arguments against a SysAdmin force that's appropriate to the age we live in and therefore usable--for American "imperial" projects, in their minds.

Enough of guys who only know war within the context of war! These are dinosaurs still roaming the planet after the asteroid has hit.

We either adjust ourselves to this frontier-integrating age or we make America an irrelevant strategic power. Again, that's fine for the old-timers who know their Vietnam and nothing else, but it does not answer the future mail. They want to paint Nagl as out of touch with enduring realities, when it's their thinking (they know what they know and won't change their views no matter what the evidence piling up over the past several decades) that's gone way past expiration date.

(Thanks: Endre Lunde)