Desert Storm in 1991 was four days of rapid armored slashing advances preceded by forty days and nights of withering aerial bombardment. That was not the dawn of a new age in warfare.
America is having a moment of clarity that counting on an enemy to quickly give up has a key flaw:
The lightning-fast victory of the U.S. military over the Iraqi Army in the early 1990s marked a generational turning point for warfare, with the predominant lesson being that exquisite and precise munitions were the key to winning future conflicts. This fit a narrative that many desperately wanted at that time: namely, that we could spend less money, have fewer forces, and turn warfare into a targeting exercise by overwhelming the enemy with precise, short-burst barrages driven by top-down decision-making, all enabled by the digital revolution.
My take on the decisive battlefield victory was that deploying and not fighting was the key lesson wrongly learned. I warned long wars were possible despite intentions for a short and glorious war; and that we need reserves ready to fight wars that stubbornly drag on.
But yeah, counting on the enemy to give up before we run out of our fancy weapons has turned out to be a mistaken lesson. But at least we are belatedly responding to the FLASH OVERRIDE message about the blaring alarm that Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine set off about our inadequate logistics base.
Let's hope we aren't too late to deter enemies rather than inspire them to strike while they can:
First and foremost, the overall thrust of the new DoD report is that today’s defense industrial base (“DIB”), after years of post-Cold War consolidation, is insufficient to meet our needs, and that we need a more robust, broader, and deeper set of industrial capabilities that can yield additional production (not just prototypes) and deeper weapons stockpiles.
Short and glorious wars aren't likely. Few soldiers come home by Christmas. Because all too often, a war becomes a struggle of inputs
Fingers crossed that our enemies are in worse shape than we are.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
