Dempsey may be smart, but he's wrong, because the next war can't be predicted

By Jörg Muth

Best Defense department of allied counsel

I have to agree with my historian colleague Robert
Goldich that General
Dempsey's remarks contain more bad news than good news. Between his lines lies excuses for further cuts in the budget and the emphasis on
networking and good relations with the allies appears to be wishful
thinking rather than an actual reliable cornerstone for a strategy or force structure.

Historically no component of any policy or strategy is as
unreliable as an ally or former friend. In the 1930s the best partner of the U.S.
Army were the German Armed Forces. There was an officer exchange program in
place and until 1940 (!) all German military schools were open for U.S. officers
to visit or attend. The Americans saw the new German medium tank paraded in
front of them and the new top secret heavy howitzer. Finally, the U.S. assistant
military attaché rode with the German tanks into Poland.

Your current partner might be your future enemy or just
refuse to aid you in your next predicament. Military strategy and the structure
of force cannot reliably be based on networking and allies. The U.S. Armed Forces
need to plan to go alone if necessary and have adequate forces to do so. The
current planning moves in the wrong direction. It is again based more on gadgets and
technology and less on numbers and soldiers with rifles in their hands.

Recommended reading for all military planners would be Ralph
Peters' book War
in 2020 (especially
intriguing because the year is mentioned in Dempsey's remarks). The novel
describes a downsized U.S. Army which is super-professional, networked, and has an
enormous technological advantage over its enemies. For a variety of reasons
this small but gadget-heavy army sustains catastrophic casualties and thus
becomes nearly nonoperational as a result. With terrible costs -- human, monetary,
and ethical -- it is built up and set back on track to defeat its enemies on a
conventional battlefield as well as a in a guerrilla war. Sound familiar? Look back in U.S. military history, just minus the gadgets. You don't want to do
that again, do you?

Future wars and future enemies cannot be predicted. Too
often in the past the U.S. army was focused on the wrong opponent and had
doctrines laid out for the wrong kind of war. An army does not need an exact
vision of a future war -- there are too many variables. Because of that an army
needs to stay flexible -- first in mind, and second in force structure. And it
needs the numbers and quality to maintain both in any conflict.

Jörg
Muth, PhD, is a historian and an expert on the U.S. Army, past and present.
He is the author of Command
Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces,
1901-1940, and the Consequences for World War II. The book was placed by the Army Chief of Staff, General Raymond T.
Odierno, on his professional reading list.