Ground forces will lack artillery pieces and shells and will find its logistics stretched, and tank mods of recent 20 years were going the wrong way for a shooting war, and new combat vehicles like Stryker and not what a real war requires, so it will have some trouble, but ground forces need to act only in the very end - where enemy is softened enough by airstrikes - and that will work whole lot better than in Desert Storm these days. Much more kills per sortie due to all these smart munitions - and there are sufficient numbers of them to break down any armed forces in the world.
So in essence, air force will make sure that every adversary will be pretty soon down to 'asymmetric warfare' level if not completely defeated. Think Russian WWII partisans. And that is what US Army has an excellent experience dealing with.
Real soldiers have respect for their adversary and since they practice war in war games, they know that no adversary can be discounted. In particular intelligence and willpower count for far more than weaponry. The film Avatar is another good example of how arrogance about the adversary led to defeat.
The enemy that you need to fear is the one who is not afraid to suffer pain and loss. Like the Soviet Union in WWI for instance. Or Syria's Army nowadays.
Haha, read this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
Ochmanek has run the two-day table-top exercise eight times now, including at the Pentagon and at Ramstein Air Base, in Germany, with active-duty military officers. “We played it 16 different times with eight different teams,” Ochmanek says, “always with the same conclusion.”
Can you guess what the conclusion was?
Having a group trained and equipped to specifically fight asymmetric warfare is the way to go. They should also be able to help train police, ambulance etc. get basic services working and monitor + prosecute corruption in the regime that's been installed.
Either the shooting war ends real quick with a diplomatic solution, or the territories of both adversaries quickly turn into faintly glowing wastelands uninhabitable for a thousand years.
The only warfare that matters today is asymmetrical warfare against relatively low-tech guerrillas and third-tier states. Once you credibly threaten the homeland of any opponent near the US's level of military sophistication, you've already lost the war.
No, that's not correct, and is emblematic of the insistence to "always train for the last war." The reality of what future war might look like is much more nuanced than "either MAD or more COIN." General Milley talked about this last summer, and I tend to agree with his assessment. Incidentally his critique is inline with the posted article about mindless obedience.
http://breakingdefense.com/2016/10/miserable-disobedient-vic...
I think of this every time I hear, "XXX is irrelevant in this age of asymmetric warfare." Sure, maybe that system or doctrine is not useful when fighting 1,000 militants blended into a city of 1,000,000. But what happens if/when we get into a shooting war with an adversary that has a real army, a real air force, and/or a real navy? Will it look like Desert Storm? Or will it look like the Bay of Pigs invasion? And could the US in 2040 look like France in 1940?