Core doctrinal change

ARTICLE: Pentagon Rethinking Old Doctrine on 2 Wars, By THOM SHANKER, New York Times, March 14, 2009

Now we are getting to the core doctrinal change: the force-sizing rationales that have dominated our thinking since Cold War's end.

As soon as the Pentagon admits to the need to balance the here-and-now conflicts with hypothetical future ones, some serious rebalancing between the small wars and big-wars force structures is possible.

(Thanks: Dan Hare)

Comments

[Louis Heberlein]

In the past, Pentagon and academic experts on military matters emphasized that planning and practicing for 2 big wars provided skills, knowledge and resources that would be useful for other conflicts.

Most of the experts involved in such evaluations had little contemporary experience with post Cold War unexpected brushfires that military had to deal with on global basis. The canned practice exercises with their skills and resources then had to be unlearned, and the limited appropriate ones cobbled together in the right place, sometimes a little late.

Even now, China is portrayed as a replay of an unnoticed Bismarck Germany quietly building battleships to surprise a modern equivalent of Britain's gunboat fleet. Beware of analogies.