Age of Forever Wars
Since the nineteenth century, military strategists have been fixated on speed and planning for this duration of conflict, often shuddering at the thought of attritional warfare
What is a short war?
Defense analyst Colin Gray defines strategy as a two-way bridge between means (combat) and these policy goals
What are ends?
When war broke out in Europe in 1914, the tiny US Army was primarily focused on border defense in locations including the Philippines, Hawaii, Alaska, and this vital waterway
What is the Panama Canal?
As seen in Ukraine, a country can get stuck in this type of lengthy conflict because an incautious adversary has miscalculated the risks
What is a protracted war?
According to Stephen Biddle, despite the introduction of new weapons, the most important adaptations in warfare are often not technological, but rather one of these two types
What are operational or tactical?
The 1973 Yom Kippur War highlighted the shocking lethality of the modern battlefield, noting that the Egyptians and Syrians lost more of these armored vehicles in 18 days than the entire US 7th Army possessed in Europe
What are tanks?
When wars are not going well, the desire to avoid the appearance of weakness or incompetence often leads to expanding this type of objective
What is a political objective?
Colin Gray argues that an ongoing fallacy is the belief that modern technology can completely do away with these two inherent difficulties of war
What are fog and friction?
Following the Yom Kippur War, this specific branch of the US military was noted to have a culture far less enamored with pursuing detailed, data-intensive evaluations to guide its behavior
What is the U.S. Air Force?
This phrase describes a situation where neither side can impose a victory on the other, even if one or both occasionally manage to improve their positions
What is not losing?
Colin Gray cites this historical military leader who claimed that the higher conduct of war is acquired by studying the history of wars and battles, as "there are no terse and precise rules at all"
What is Napoleon?
Prior to entering WWI, the most consistent, informed, and analytical information available to the US Army came from reports filed by these officers assigned to foreign capitals and allied armies
What are military attaches?
Proving that the results of war are never final, this nation's military triumph in 1967 ultimately created the conditions for many subsequent wars
What is Israel?
Biddle notes that while technology has become ever more lethal, overall outcomes haven't drastically changed because targets have increasingly adapted to become these two things
What are dispersed and concealed?
While studying the 1973 conflict, the US Army found that infantry fighting vehicles like the Soviet BMP and this proposed American equivalent lacked the armor protection necessary to survive
What is the Bradley?