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Originally Posted by 95th Rifleman
However the gap between Russian and American kit is nowhere near as big as Americans like to think and it's getting narrower every year.
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I’m less worried about the gap in hardware than I’m worried about the gap in thinking. The Brits and French disposed more tanks with better protection and firepower compared to the Germans on the eve of the Battle of France. We all know what happened. We could go on and on about the whys, but the fact remains that the Germans out-thought the Franco-British forces. The Japanese out-thought the Brits in Malaya. There were no miracle technologies applied—just clear-headed thinking about what to do with the tools available. The Vietnamese Communists beat us with a combination of clear-headed thinking and commitment. One of the main reasons we disemboweled the Iraqis in Operation Desert Storm is the bankruptcy of Iraqi thinking at the very highest level. The unnecessarily extended series of OIFs is a direct result of a thinking gap that started at the top and went all the way down. We’re unable to win in Afghanistan partly because our leadership is as focused on managing the news cycle as it is on winning the war and partly because we’re too proud to learn from anyone else’s experience and terrified that the slender support of the American public will evaporate in the wake of a single incident a la Mogadishu. Forget the hardware—it’s the thinking that’s the problem.
The Russian development of a helicopter fighter is a perfect example of the problem. We develop an attack helicopter so capable that the enemy has to do something about it that departs from the solutions in place. He does. All our confident plans for use of rotary wing CAS might have been undone by the fear of the helicopter fighter once a few successful missions were executed by the enemy.
Asymetric warfare isn’t just for al-Qaeda. It’s for anyone who is interested in finding a solution that doesn’t involve the development of a rival weapon system. More than ever, a single hard setback is likely to drive the US out of the war. We can’t finance an eventual turnaround the way we did in WW2 and Korea. Cyberspace warfare, for instance, may prove a great equalizer. Cash flow is less important here than in mechanized warfare. The US takes cyber operations seriously, but they may prove to be another Battle of France in which clear-headed thinking carries the day for an enemy. [By the way, I’m glad the leader of cyber operations is the USAF. Of the services, they are the least hide bound.] Any number of other options exist for the cash-poor but highly motivated.
The thinking gap is where we’re falling short. We did just fine taking over Iraq and Afghanistan, but we completely failed to capitalize on our success. Iraq appears to have acquired sufficient inertia to creak forward on its own. Afghanistan will revert to Taliban control within months of our departure. Had we committed enough troops to create the space in which police could perform effectively, and had we invested properly in training proper police forces for both countries, things might look differently now. The same thinking gap is likely to appear during our next conflict.