While we have been right to focus on winning in Iraq--and I've argued that we had to risk breaking the Army to win in Iraq--when we can afford to we must rebalance the Army to regain our conventional warfare edge.
Strategypage complains of our military's focus on conventional warfare despite our current counter-insurgency campaigns:
The "last battle of the Cold War" was fought in Kuwait in 1991, when an American led force quickly crushed a Soviet equipped and trained troops.
Despite the striking victory in Kuwait, American military leaders continued to maintain a force prepared to fight Cold War era battles. Along comes September 11, 2001, Afghanistan, Iraq and the international war on Islamic terrorists. Now U.S. troops are forced to fight a war very different from anything the Cold War promised. As American military planners looked to the future, some saw more irregular warfare, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, while other called for remaining ready for conventional (Cold War era) combat.
As an aside, I wrote about the "last battle of the Cold War" aspect of the Persian Gulf War here.
Strategypage does see some hope despite what they see as an incorrect focus on conventional warfare at the expense of counter-insurgency:
In a break with the past, the current senior leadership is at least contemplating adopting a different attitude towards irregular warfare. The military, especially the U.S. Army, has created a "lessons learned" organization that is capturing and preserving much of the experience gained in recent fighting. Thus, unlike the past, the battlefield knowledge will not be quickly lost, or at least buried. But the procurement and weapons development establishment is still willing to ditch this diversion into irregular warfare, and get back to preparing for the Big One.
We are in a diversion into irregular warfare that must be corrected when we have the opportunity. It would be a mistake to neglect to win the counter-insurgency fights we are in now to prepare for a conventional war that may not come. But we are winning the fight in Iraq and will soon get that opportunity. Should we really continue to focus on counter-insurgency at the expense of conventional war skills?
First of all, we had difficulty enough fighting a counter-insurgency with President Bush leading us and backed by Congress. Does anybody really think that a president and Congress elected by what these officials believe is an anti-war mandate will make use of counter-insurgency skills to actually fight such a war should we need to? I don't. They opposed a counter-insurgency campaign to defeat his henchmen, Iranian stooges, and al Qaeda. How much more evil can you get? If these people in our former loyal opposition couldn't be motivated to fight a counter-insurgency against these scum, what conceivable enemy would they fight? Nazi, Pro-Life, Banker insurgents who keep blowing up the Women's Studies Department at Berkeley?
Second, I think that troops trained for conventional warfare are our best defense for any threat. As long as the officers and institutions retain the counter-insurgency knowledge, our well-trained troops who generally focus on conventional fighting skills can be employed in a counter-insurgency successfully.
The impact of facing a conventional enemy military with our own Army that has focused on counter-insurgency could lead to the destruction of our army. An Army focused on conventional war can be employed successfully to fight insurgents and terrorists if employed by officers who understand how to use our troops, as our Iraq campaign demonstrates so well.
Train our military for tough conventional warfare while retaining the knowledge of counter-insurgency skills. We will have the time to adjust a conventional army to counter-insurgency. A conventional enemy won't provide us with that time, and they'd smash whatever counter-insurgency-trained force we send against them.
The price of failure in a conventional fight is too high to risk any other course.
