Right now, the US has too much of that. Wars against peer or near-peer enemies need less counter-insurgency operations and more heavy equipment.
The US has become used to operating in environments where air superiority was total, and secure base camps were possible. That's over.
The US Army takes this seriously. Read Parameters, the War College journal, which has many articles on this subject. Here are two.[1][2] It's a major argument within the US military.
There are some serious mismatches in preparation. The USMC has a great concept of a MAGTF - a Marine Air Ground Task Force, usually carried in an amphibious assault ship. This is great for COIN - the ship can go somewhere in a hurry, park offshore, and send out landing craft and air support, while acting as a mobile base. This works great against an enemy with nothing capable of attacking such a ship. Less well against an enemy with truck-mounted anti-ship missiles.
The Army has too many vehicles intended to resist improvised explosive devices, and not enough heavy artillery and tanks. The Army is also used to being able to set up rear area bases in the open, and fortified fire bases in hostile territory. Those now look like soft targets.
The USAF is used to being able to fly cargo planes such as C-130s into combat zones. This now looks suicidal where everybody has anti-aircraft missiles. Today, if it flies over a combat zone, it had better be able to dodge, jam, and fight. Or be expendable, like a drone.
One of the lessons of the Ukraine war for the Navy is that you can't bring naval vessels near a hostile shore any more. Not since the Moskva.
[1] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol46/iss4/3/
[2] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol47/iss1/13/
Eg, this.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/rebuilding-us-inventories-six-...
Successfully waging an asymmetric war relies on the assumption that in a conflict of choice, the agressor can be inflicted enough pain to quit. The Soviet failures in Afghanistan, and the Americans in Vietnam, convinced the world of this fact. But that breaks down entirely when your agressor treats their own people as cattle for the slaughter, and has the viable means to maintain power regardless. We are entering a dark new age where the answer to "what would WWI look like with modern technology" is now being answered.
So all that's left is just to hammer each other over the head with artillery and poke at each other with drones.
I am not convinced that other conflicts will look like this.
Classic Russian strategy. The USSR lost 20 million people in WWII.
They didn't have a choice. It was a war for their civilizational survival. If they surrendered to Germany, the Western part of the country would have been killed/enslaved, with the rump Eastern part carved up at Germany's leisure.
If they walk out of Ukraine, nothing happens except the killing stops.
Sure. But there was a sense that that was a relic of a bygone age. The role of Russian mothers helping to shame the CCCP into capitulation during Afghanistan is well known. We thought that people would never stand for that kind of bloodshed again.
You even see it still in the western response. "They can't keep this up", or "The people will overthrow Putin!". It's a total failure to comprehend that we are in fact facing an evil that the world has not seen in many generations.
>But that breaks down entirely when your agressor treats their own people as cattle for the slaughter
That sounds like victim blaming. We had to massacre the Vietnamese, they didn't have to fight.
https://nypost.com/2023/11/07/news/hamas-leaders-worth-11bn-...
New technology used for war such as lasers or AI will only make war even more asymmetric.
So essentially, big-countries can't attack other big-countries because of nukes and MAD (mutually-assured-destruction). Big-countries can't attack small-countries because of asymmetric war. Small-countries can't attack big-countries for obvious reasons. So, the only war left is small-countries vs small-countries.
That sounds like a recipe for Oceania/Eastasia proxy wars in the Disputed Territories?
i'm curious how the author felt knowing that his paper would be so relevant only a few months after publication.
from https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/my-time-in-the-torment-...
https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-abstract/26/1/93/11698/H...
