But after nearly three decades of not worrying about facing an enemy that could wage conventional war for a long period, this is a good thing to keep in mind:
The United States is blessed with a geography that has given it two wide oceans to guard its flanks, insulating it from many direct challenges to the homeland. But the same isolation that helps protect the United States also becomes a tyranny of distance when it comes to the U.S. military's ability to project force on the Eurasian landmass. During both World War II and the Cold War, the United States had to account for (and, in the case of World War II, battle across) the Atlantic Ocean to deploy forces in Europe. Similarly, the United States has created a vast logistics chain to ensure its ability to project forces across the Pacific Ocean to East Asia, Australasia and beyond.
Today, the United States benefits greatly from supply chains and transportation infrastructure that allow it to trade and deploy its forces across large distances in peacetime. Nevertheless, the United States must prepare for the real possibility that it will not enjoy such unencumbered access to maritime routes if its competition with either China or Russia escalates into open hostilities. And compounding the issue for Washington is the emergence of new disruptive technologies, the weakening strength of the United States' merchant marine fleet and the myriad diplomatic issues that Washington must consider every time it crosses national boundaries.
Do read it all.
Working with NATO to ease the physical an legal barriers in the new NATO states is one way we are working on this. Another is to stand up a fleet for the Atlantic to get forces and supplies to Europe in the first place. And we are practicing moving brigades from the continental United States to Europe (and to South Korea now).
I've noted all those efforts.
Rebuilding war reserve stocks of ammunition and spare parts so we can fight until factories can ramp up from "peacetime" (you know what I mean) levels is crucial.
Luckily we aren't as bad off as we could be without the Iraq War. Based on our experience in Desert Storm when we moved multiple iron mountains to Saudi Arabia that were never needed to defeat Saddam's army, we flirted with "just in time" logistics in Iraq. It worked in the invasion but in the insurgency we discovered that insurgents could interrupt the flow, leading us to at least build "iron hills" to endure temporary supply cuts. And the mountain concept was retained in landlocked Afghanistan.
Hopefully that pain of supply worries is remembered as we work on other issues, like our weak merchant marine.
And remember that this need for a global logistics tail is a major reason we have relatively few combat units compared to other nations with far lower defense budgets.
