Gian Gentile: Do We Have Any Idea How to Deal with North Korea?
[Colonel Gian Gentile commanded a combat battalion in West Baghdad in 2006. Currently, he is a Visiting Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.]
According to the tenets of current American military thought and practice—that is, “wars amongst the people” fought to win the hearts and minds of local populations—the capacity to have three cups of tea with a local sheik equals the ability to counter and coordinate artillery fires. Indeed, America’s conventional war-fighting capacity has atrophied to the point that a recent internal Army report termed artillery America’s “dead branch walking.” And, yet, here we are, watching the two Koreas exchange artillery fire and sit on the precipice of war—a war in which the United States Army would be deeply involved, fully equipped, and presumably trained for a cup of tea.
The vogue that counterinsurgency has enjoyed over the past three years stifled arguments to the contrary; the prospect that future wars might involve something other than fighting insurgents who set off IEDs and then scamper away elicited nothing but derision. Suggesting that perhaps the United States military may soon have to fight a war where actual armies square off against each other labels one as a member of the old school, a pea-brained dinosaur in the “doesn’t get it club.” Never mind that the mantra after Operation Desert Storm was that there would never be another Desert Storm. Never mind, too, that after the next Desert Storm blew up—the drive to Baghdad in 2003—the only (and unlikely) scenario that planners could envision for conventional war involved conflict on the Korean peninsula: We now have a conflict on the Korean peninsula....
Read entire article at The New Republic
According to the tenets of current American military thought and practice—that is, “wars amongst the people” fought to win the hearts and minds of local populations—the capacity to have three cups of tea with a local sheik equals the ability to counter and coordinate artillery fires. Indeed, America’s conventional war-fighting capacity has atrophied to the point that a recent internal Army report termed artillery America’s “dead branch walking.” And, yet, here we are, watching the two Koreas exchange artillery fire and sit on the precipice of war—a war in which the United States Army would be deeply involved, fully equipped, and presumably trained for a cup of tea.
The vogue that counterinsurgency has enjoyed over the past three years stifled arguments to the contrary; the prospect that future wars might involve something other than fighting insurgents who set off IEDs and then scamper away elicited nothing but derision. Suggesting that perhaps the United States military may soon have to fight a war where actual armies square off against each other labels one as a member of the old school, a pea-brained dinosaur in the “doesn’t get it club.” Never mind that the mantra after Operation Desert Storm was that there would never be another Desert Storm. Never mind, too, that after the next Desert Storm blew up—the drive to Baghdad in 2003—the only (and unlikely) scenario that planners could envision for conventional war involved conflict on the Korean peninsula: We now have a conflict on the Korean peninsula....