Disconnect Between Obama's Defense Policy and New US Army Doctrine - - Imagine That

According to Obama's national security adviser Richard Danzig (Secretary of the Navy under Clinton), "Obama would make sure that the Pentagon doesn't become overly focused on fighting guerrillas and terrorists at the expense of traditional air and sea power. 'I think the temptation is to invest in the issue du jour or the cause dujour and to overlook a lot of basics,' Mr. Danzig said. At the same time, there will be a focus on cyber warfare and unmanned aerial vehicles, he said. [Wall Street Journal, October 3, 2008]

Ironically, today, the US Army unveiled its "Stability Operations Field Manual" which declares that nation-building missions will become more important than conventional warfare. [Washington Post, October 5, 2008].

An interesting point the Washington Post article makes is that since the American Revolution, only 11 of the hundreds of U.S. military operations were conventional.

Now, I do think its important that our nation be prepared to fight a conventional war - YES. Russia and China are re-tooling themselves conventionally thanks to all the US money flowing into their countries for oil and cheap manufactured goods. Who do you think they are preparing themselves to fight? Possibly each other - - always a possibility. But most likely, to fight us, the United States. However, most of the conflicts we've been involved in have been insurgencies or low intensity conventional. While I applaud the Obama campaign with putting cyber warfare out there as a threat to be reckoned with - - its hardly conventional but can be a chaos driver -- we need to be prepared to fight what we are most likely to face. Terrorists and guerillas are hardly "issue du jour".

I actually started laughing at the contrast between what the Obama adviser thinks and is advising and what the "In the Fight" Army thinks and is advising its own. I laughed until it hit me that this opposite ends of the spectrum thinking between an actual military branch and the possible future defense policy of this nation was really quite scary.

At first it sounded like more of the "Do more with greater technology and less numbers," until I read the WSJ article further where Danzig said one way to control costs may be to change the focus to buying greater numbers of less sophisticated weapons systems.

Hmmm, sticks and stones....