Nearly a decade after the United States began to focus its military training and equipment purchases almost exclusively on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. military strategists are quietly shifting gears, saying that large-scale counterinsurgency efforts cost too much and last too long.This is an overly simplistic narrative of what happened. Military training eventually came to be focused almost exclusively on OIF and OEF. Military acquisitions never became anywhere close to exclusively focused on OIF and OEF. Over the past decade we’ve procured roughly 150 next-generation fighter planes (the F-22), six new SSNs (a force that, by itself, is roughly the size of the UK’s or France’s SSN fleet), completed work on a supercarrier (CVN-76), built an entirely new supercariier (CVN-76) and started work on a new class of carrier (CVN-78).
I still haven’t done it or seen anyone attempt it, but I expect that if you went through the procurement budget over the past decade and tried to categorize all the investments as either “conventional,” “COIN” or “both,” you’d find that the plurality of money spent was in the “conventional” category. Gates made an similar assessment of the overall budget in 2009.
The history is more complicated than the either/or dichotomies that crop up in press reports, journal articles and op-eds. The DoD took a while at the start of OIF in restructure itself to respond to the irregular/COIN missions it was facing in Iraq. Then acquisitions lagged even further behind. Almost immediately, there began to be calls that we were fighting the last war (ignoring the fact that a war has to end before one can honestly call it the last war). We never fully shifted our procurement portfolio towards COIN and irregular warfare.
Granted, simplistic narratives are easier than confronting the hard questions of setting true priorities and making real choices about which ends we most want to pursue with our scarce resources. Strategy is hard.
