Written by: Goemagog

From the Belmont Club:

At the one end, the DOD must face continuous challenges from asymmetrical opponents harboring in the hulks of failed, post-Colonial states. At the other, it must face conventional threats from rising Great Powers like China. America's enemies on these separate fronts will be naturally tempted to lend each other mutual aid.

Well, China is giving military assistance to Iran, threatening to attack Taiwan, and beefing up it's military.

Rumsfeld's response appears to be shaped by this reality. It is a search for systems, organizations and strategies which possess utility both against terrorism and rival states. In some cases a match will be easy to find. In others, most notably in the case of heavy divisions, manned aircraft and naval systems, there must be a trade-off between them.

What we're seeing is heavy divisions, manned aircraft, and naval systems traded in for research projects. Nobody knows if or when those research projects will result in deployable systems. We don't even know who will run those systems since military recruitment is dropping below sustainable levels.

The big problem with the Belmont Club's analysis is here:

For the first time in its history, the United States (and Europe too, had they the honesty to realize it) faces a two-front war, not spatially but dimensionally.

We actually face a poly-front war both dimensionally and spatially, and we've not the wherewithall to fight it. Our cold war military was set up to fight the Soviet Union. We had equipment and strategies to fight large armored battles on the plains of Europe. It's generally accepted that we needed to drop that military because future wars probably won't be fought on plains in Europe.

What is generally accepted is, in this case, wrong. We had equipment and strategies to fight the Soviet Union in large armored battles on the plains of Europe, and we had the equipment and strategies to fight the Soviet Union and it's allies in every other place that they might attack the United States or it's allies.

Throughout the Cold War, we kept the 10th Mountain Division in case we wound up fighting someplace with mountains. In the middle of the Cold War, the army created it's branch of special forces (the Green Berets) to train local militia's the world over in waging and resisting low-level warfare. The Pentagon, through DARPA and other agencies, created most of the technology found in our current military.

It used to be that the Pentagon based it's strategies and tactics on what it had on hand or could get into immediate production. The Pentagon is making it's plans to fight this war based on what it might have five or ten years from now.

When China makes a move on Taiwan, which will come somewhere between 2008 and 2020, what could anybody do to stop them? Our smaller elite units would be too vastly outnumbered to stand a chance, and our larger units are being dismantled to save money to buy the smaller elite units newer and better equipment.

If China invaded Taiwan today, there'd be practically nothing we could do about it. Since China has already invaded some of their neighbors, and is positioning itself to stake a territorial claim on North Korea, they're not likely to back down from Taiwan. They're also modernizing their military with the specific goal of being able to fight the United States. They can buy technology on par with ours off the shelf at home or in Europe, and they have the manpower to beat us in a head-to-head fight. All of the hinderances stalinistic regimes used to fight under are falling away as China shifts from stalinism to nazism.

But the Belmont Club thinks it'll be okay, because MacGyver now works at Stargate Command and will come with extra chewing gum if Rumsfeld calls him.

Goe, likes not living under chinese oppression.