03-15-2009, 08:29 AM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Pentagon Rethinking Old Doctrine on 2 Wars</b>
To some extent, fears have faded that the United States may actually have to fight, say, Russia and North Korea, or China and Iran, at the same time. But if Iraq and Afghanistan were never formidable foes in conventional terms, they have already tied up the American military for a period longer than World War II.
A senior Defense Department official involved in a strategy review now under way said the Pentagon was absorbing the lesson that the kinds of counterinsurgency campaigns likely to be part of some future wars would require more staying power than in past conflicts, like the first Iraq war in 1991 or the invasions of Grenada and Panama
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Among other questions are the extent to which planning for conflicts should focus primarily on counterinsurgency wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what focus remains on well-equipped conventional adversaries like China and Iran, with which Navy vessels have clashed at sea.
Thomas Donnelly, a defense policy expert with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he believed that the Obama administration would be seeking to come up with âa multiwar, multioperation, multifront, walk-and-chew-gum construct.â
âWe have to do many things simultaneously if our goal is to remain the ultimate guarantor of international security,â Mr. Donnelly said. âThe hedge against a rising China requires a very different kind of force than fighting an irregular war in Afghanistan or invading Iraq or building partnership capacity in Africa.â
But Mr. Donnelly cautioned that the review now under way faced a familiar challenge. âIf there has been one consistent thread through all previous defense reviews,â he said, âit is that once the review is done, there is an almost immediate gap between reality and force planning. Reality always exceeds force planning.â
It is already is obvious, a senior Pentagon official said, that the Defense Department will âneed to rebalance our strategy and our forcesâ in a way that reflects lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq. Exactly how that happens will be debated for months to come and will then play out in decisions involving hundreds of billions of dollars, involving the size of the Army, as well as such things as the number of aircraft carriers and new long-range bombers.
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To some extent, fears have faded that the United States may actually have to fight, say, Russia and North Korea, or China and Iran, at the same time. But if Iraq and Afghanistan were never formidable foes in conventional terms, they have already tied up the American military for a period longer than World War II.
A senior Defense Department official involved in a strategy review now under way said the Pentagon was absorbing the lesson that the kinds of counterinsurgency campaigns likely to be part of some future wars would require more staying power than in past conflicts, like the first Iraq war in 1991 or the invasions of Grenada and Panama
.............
Among other questions are the extent to which planning for conflicts should focus primarily on counterinsurgency wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what focus remains on well-equipped conventional adversaries like China and Iran, with which Navy vessels have clashed at sea.
Thomas Donnelly, a defense policy expert with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he believed that the Obama administration would be seeking to come up with âa multiwar, multioperation, multifront, walk-and-chew-gum construct.â
âWe have to do many things simultaneously if our goal is to remain the ultimate guarantor of international security,â Mr. Donnelly said. âThe hedge against a rising China requires a very different kind of force than fighting an irregular war in Afghanistan or invading Iraq or building partnership capacity in Africa.â
But Mr. Donnelly cautioned that the review now under way faced a familiar challenge. âIf there has been one consistent thread through all previous defense reviews,â he said, âit is that once the review is done, there is an almost immediate gap between reality and force planning. Reality always exceeds force planning.â
It is already is obvious, a senior Pentagon official said, that the Defense Department will âneed to rebalance our strategy and our forcesâ in a way that reflects lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq. Exactly how that happens will be debated for months to come and will then play out in decisions involving hundreds of billions of dollars, involving the size of the Army, as well as such things as the number of aircraft carriers and new long-range bombers.
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