The Army after This
Vegitus, a US government employee who has served in four wars, writes for the Small Wars journal an article, The Army After This, that Bob Ainsworth might like to read when he is considering his Green Paper on Defence Strategy, in it he says the following:
However, there is danger in the temptation to configure the military so far to the side of being able to fight counterinsurgencies that it cannot respond adequately by training, equipment, or temperament to the possibility of high intensity wars with rising peer or near peer competitors. The challenge of being able to “walk and chew gum at the same time” has never been greater than it will be in the coming decade.
This will be a major consideration for the UK government as well but in a quite different way, we will have to consider just how we are going to position the UK in the future. The question is more likely to be of the form who are we going to chew gum with and will they do the walking for us, as we are unlikely to be able to do both in any effective way.
Vegitus finishes off with this:
When Donald Rumsfeld said that, “you go to war with the army you have, not necessarily the one you want”, he was wrong. We went to war with the army that the U.S. Army wanted; it turns out, the Army wanted wrong. Now is the time to correct that mistake.
We need to ensure that our strategy ensures that if we do get it wrong our chewing partner can help us out, you can be sure this won’t be our supposed EU partners.
