Thread: Defense Secretary Gates: Wars like Iraq, Afghanistan slim to happen again

While talking with cadets at West Point, Gates today came out saying that "it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan," and chances of a regime change happening in that case to be incredibly slim.

Apparently he thinks it will be more likely we will move to fighting more using air and sea forces instead of large conventional forces due to the high costs of those formations.

“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it,” Mr. Gates told an assembly of Army cadets here.

That reality, he said, meant that the Army would have to reshape its budget, since potential conflicts in places like Asia or the Persian Gulf were more likely to be fought with air and sea power, rather than with conventional ground forces.

“As the prospects for another head-on clash of large mechanized land armies seem less likely, the Army will be increasingly challenged to justify the number, size, and cost of its heavy formations,” Mr. Gates warned.

“The odds of repeating another Afghanistan or Iraq — invading, pacifying, and administering a large third-world country — may be low,” Mr. Gates said, but the Army and the rest of the government must focus on capabilities that can “prevent festering problems from growing into full-blown crises which require costly — and controversial — large-scale American military intervention.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/wo...imes&seid=auto

Like Teddy said, "Speak softly and carry a big stick"

Or like someone else once said "We don't have any social problems here that a couple of thousand troops couldn't solve"

Wars happen. As long as there are humans on Earth, there will be wars. Despots, zealots, crusaders, jihadists, rebels, patriots, dictators, monarchs, and the like will always be around to ensure that wars will happen.

I don't think Gates was saying there wouldn't be war. He was more saying we won't be fighting a war like we did in Afghanistan/Iraq with huge ground forces, instead using more Air and Naval units and work on stopping problems before they turn into the next Afghanistan (or, going historial, Germany)

You will always need boots on the ground. I believe we shot cruise missiles into Afghanistan going as far back as the Clinton administration. Going historical, we bombed the shit out of Germany in WWII. They STILL find unexploded bombs here from time to time. But there is no way the Germans would have surrendered without the Allies rolling in here on the ground. The only time I can think of where someone surrendered without their homeland being invaded was Japan in WWII, but we were in Okinawa, which is practically their homeland, and we used the nukes. I do not think anyone advocates using nukes so boots on the ground will be needed.