Boots on the Ground: Why America Must Invest in Dominant Infantry Forces
Bob Scales
Ground Forces, United States
"Our enemies today no longer fear our ships and planes. They have learned to minimize the destructiveness of our big shiny objects."
There is an old saying that generals and admirals are like bass…they’re drawn to bright shiny objects. The same holds true in spades for politicians. America has sought to win its wars by investing huge sums on big shiny objects that float and fly in the hope that our wars can be won by expending materiel rather than men.
To avoid bloodshed in battle we plan to fight our wars by assuming (or hoping) that our allies will substitute their soldiers for ours; that we will fight using “non kinetic” forms of national power such as diplomacy, information and economic leverage; that tomorrow’s warriors will fight in cyberspace and that if any killing is necessary it will be done by armed drones.
Unfortunately throughout the “American Era of War,” that period of conflict since the end of World War II, America’s hopes for bloodless battle has rarely been realized. Our great fleets are intended to sink enemy fleets. But America’s last major ship-on-ship battle was fought in 1944. Our expensive flights of fighter jets are designed principally to shoot down enemy planes in air-to-air combat. But the last time the air services fought against a serious aerial opponent was the Christmas bombing offensive over North Vietnam in 1972. We have yet to bury the first cyber soldier on either side.
Why don’t our enemies fight us like we want them to? Simple. Over the past seventy years they have learned and adapted. Here’s what they’ve learned: First, spot the Americans the air and the sea (and space). Our enemies have proven that they can win on the ground alone. Second, they win by making the war last and by just killing Americans. They want to kill Americans not as a means to an end by as an end in itself. They know that our great national vulnerability is public opinion. The surest way to affect public opinion is to kill Americans as publicly and dramatically as the global media will allow. A useful corollary is to highlight to the media our killing of innocents through mistake and miscalculation.
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