Just ... God damn it:
The political battles over chronic deficit spending in the United States has led to sharp and often unexpected cuts in the military budget over the last few years. This has forced the U.S. Air force to make major cuts in the hours combat pilots fly for training. The latest cut reduces many pilots to 120 hours a year. That’s about half of what it was a decade ago. There is concern that this will threaten the domination of the air the United States has had since World War II. Moreover it’s been over 60 years since any American troops have been attacked from the air. Much of that is attributed to high number of hours American pilots spend training in the air each year. But with it costing over $20,000 an hour to keep combat aircraft in the air many military budgets can’t handle it.
Yes, increasingly sophisticated simulators can make up some of that training deficit. But we can't really know for sure, as opposed to knowing for sure that reduced flying hours reduces the odds of surviving let alone winning aerial combat.
The same applies to ground forces and naval forces, of course. Train the way you want to fight because you'll fight the way you train.
I noted in 1997, back when we thought history (and war) had ended, that training and readiness are too easily discounted because they aren't quantifiable in peacetime:
The critical advantages provided by highly trained soldiers with good morale are not easily quantifiable in peacetime. The lack of quality becomes quantifiable, indirectly, when one counts the burned-out armored vehicles of an army whose troops did not know how to use their equipment and who lacked the will to fight on in adversity.
So I have no doubt we'll stop teaching these lessons of war to our troops, as memory of war fades.
But we won't face that price since we aren't going to war any time soon. We don't want to fight so we don't need to train. Right?
Because war is always a question that we answer--not our enemies.
UPDATE: Strategypage's number 10 on their list of things that matter that you almost never hear about:
Who's Ready for What? The size of armed forces usually is reported in terms of quantity, not quality. This is odd, since most wars are decided by the quality of the troops, not how many of them there are. "Readiness" is the term most often used to describe this and you rarely get a straight answer when looking for the readiness of any armed forces. But it's how much readiness a forces has, not how many troops or weapons, that says it all regarding fighting power.
The funny thing is, if everyone is stupid about this, focusing on numbers will fool your potential enemies (and allies) into thinking you have a good military.
But in the end it is still a bad idea to give readiness a lower priority. Because some foe might figure it out. Or just as likely your own leaders will find a mission that needs to be done (whether for national security or humanitarian reasons) and wrongly believe they will be ordering a good military into action to achieve it.
Hilarity does not ensue.
