A Perfect War

I don’t think there’s ever been a perfect war in US history, though the 1991 Operation Desert Storm came pretty close. In that short conflict every thing seemed to go right, including American weapons, training, and doctrine. Usually when the nation goes to war, it finds itself with the wrong weapons, wrong strategy, and with little training for the few troops its does possess. The latter has been a recurring problem in all US military history: the lack of adequate ground troops. This is a striking fact since it is far cheaper and faster to create new divisions than to build and equip a navy.

I read somewhere that for a single aircraft carrier strike group we could field 3 fully-equipped army divisions. America currently has 12 such groups in service, which are seeing very little action in contrast to our hard-pressed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. On numerous occasions there hasn’t been a single carrier in the Gulf region.
The main problem with replacing carriers for troops is Congress, whose members benefit from building these giant and expensive monoliths. It takes ten years to construct a Nimitz class ship, so this means ten years employment for potential voters. Get the idea? Still, were the Navy to decrease the size of its carrier fleet by half, the savings would produce about 15 new divisions.

Then you would need the air and sealift to ferry the forces to global hotspots. As far as air transport, you would have to compete with the Air Force for hot jet fighters and stealth bombers. Yet, for a ground-pounder, a cheap fighter able to carry precision bombs, such as the slow but sure A-10 attack plane, is a welcome sight. Increasingly in Iraq the troops are utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for air support.

Another impediment to a perfect war is the submarine. In almost every conflict we are surprised by the peculiar abilities of the undersea boat. Most recently, the Navy was “shocked” a Chinese diesel sub pierced its anti-sub screen and got within striking range of the carrier Kitty Hawk. It’s the same in every war since World War 1.

In a perfect war, the US would go to battle with this type of military:

*A large and well trained army, taught to fight in both a counter-insurgency and conventional conflict.

*Adequate air and sealift for the latter.

*A small navy battle group backed up by sizable anti-submarine warfare forces.

Of course, no war will ever be perfect, lacking civilian casualties or battlefield mistakes by civilian and military leaders. But if we have the military we need, rather than the weapons we wish to have, such as cool fighters, bombers, supercarriers, and battle tanks, maybe the war would end sooner rather than later.