Fighting the Last War

Surpisingly, I read something of interest the other day from the Obama campaign. The issue was preparing for the next threat to the United States and not the most recent. Obviously this possible threat would be a resurgent Russia or a rising China. The question is - are we spending all of our resources fighting the current low intensity conflict while ignoring the strategic and conventional threat from the mentioned tyrannical regimes?

I have to admit - in my previous life as a special operations helicopter pilot in an Air Force run by the fighter mafia, I had no love lost for arrogant fighter pilots that knew nothing that went on under 30,000 feet. In the last few decades, we prepared for the large strategic threat and ignored low intinsity conflict to our detrament; the results of which we have seen in Iraq. Now I fear we have gone too far the other way. We have an historical tendancy to train and support fighting current threats while ignoring the future.

I believe we need to maintain the capability to prosecute and win two wars on a global scale. One of those should be a conventional conflict against a large and possibly nuclear oponent.

This could mean devoting a larger share of our defense budget to buying F-22s, a larger navy and conventional army, in addition to fighting a low-intensity conflict in a place like Iraq.

This will take money and willpower that perhaps the United States does not have right now; however, not following this path could have disastrous consequences in the future.