Consider the German's at the end of World War 2. They had the most technologically advanced force on the planet. They fielded the worlds best tanks, airplanes and at one time battleships. Many of their plans for the future were seized by the allies and used to build the force of the 1950's. Many have speculated that if Hitler had held off attacking the Soviet Union just one year that they could have won the war because England would have fell and the US would have concentrated on fighting the Japanese.
But the air war in Western Europe gives the best example of what we're facing today (it certainly applies to the ground war but that's another discussion). The Germans built Me-262's. A plane with blistering speed, massive firepower and flown by combat experienced pilots.
In theory it should have swept the skies, but larger numbers of less capable airplanes like the P-51 and Spitfire jumped them in wolf packs and made even takeoffs difficult.
The US is repeating Hitler's Germany mistake. We're going small. Very small...and high tech.
Now check out this passage from a talk given by Hagel....
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel today argued for troop reductions to preserve spending on advanced technology from defense contractors amid more than $500 billion in automatic budget cuts scheduled through 2023.Congress and a desperate President (Bush) brought this on. Veterans groups encouraged it and no one (including me) called foul when it was happening.
“In some cases we will make a shift, for example, by prioritizing a smaller, modern, and capable military over a larger force with older equipment,” Hagel said in remarks prepared for an address before the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a policy research group in Washington.
The statement reflects a determination in the Pentagon to protect sophisticated and costly weapons, such as Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT:US)’s F-35 fighter, that are seen as giving the U.S. military a competitive advantage.
We priced service members out of the military by pay increases every year. By pushing more and more benefits. By changing service to one of bonuses and payouts instead of service to nation.
Now we have a twisted Pentagon pushing Rumsfeld's vision of Transformation while we all know what it will lead to.
We're going to have a super high tech but small force that will not withstand day two of a conflict. We'll go in hard and make massive gains but we'll get pushed off the hill because we will not be robust enough to maintain our momentum. We're setting ourselves up to fail.
All we have to do is study WW2.
