Day: March 20, 2005

Peter Grier, staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor, takes an interesting look at the structure and equipment of the American military and how they are being shaped by the Iraqi campaign.

Hard service in Iraq is wearing out some of the US military’s core weapons. Tanks, armored vehicles, and aircraft are being run at rates two to six times greater than in peacetime, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Congress earlier this month.

The bad news here is they may need to be replaced. But there’s good news too, according to Secretary Rumsfeld: It’s possible they can be replaced with something better.

The need to refurbish equipment “is providing an opportunity to adjust the capabilities of the force earlier than otherwise might have been the case,” Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee on March 10.

Perhaps the same might be said of the military as a whole.

[…]

The US may have gone to war with the Army it had, to paraphrase Secretary Rumsfeld. But it’s likely to leave the war with armed services that are considerably different.

Go give it a gander. While the article looks, with varying degrees of depth, at all of the involved branches, I found myself cringing slightly at the following.

“We have to design our armed forces for the 360-degree battlefield and not the linear battlefield,” [Gen. John Abizaid, US Central Commander,] told House Armed Services Committee members.

I’ve written before on the ever-present problem of applying lessons learned to the military — it is all too easy to end up preparing for the previous war and find one’s self blindsided by the realities of the next war. I worry that we may go too far into this 360-degree, high mobility direction and completely lose the ability to slug it out on a more traditional battlefield.