GeorgeWBush.com :: Agenda for America – Chapter 4
America Must Continue to Adapt to the Challenges of the 21st Century – President Bush will continue leading the transformation of our Nation’s Armed Forces. America will develop a lighter, faster, more lethal force, with the best training for the new challenges of the new century.
Not much to say here, except that this just makes sense. We’re not facing a monolithic enemy with a million man army across an Iron Curtain anymore. China, of course, has a huge army and the resources to provide bullets for most of their guns, but if it gets to the point of military confrontation with the Chinese we’ll be looking at rethinking lots of things and we’d better hope we have a working missile defense in place. Aside from that possibility, the battles of the coming century look a lot more like the relatively small conflicts of earlier centuries than like the industrialized all out war of the first half of the twentieth. Whether it’s chasing terrorists out of caves or dealing with the next genocide Africans perpetrate on each other, smaller specialized forces look like what is needed, supported by the armored forces and airpower as needed.
Or more to the point, the great theorists of warfare would say that the most important thing is to know the enemy we face and knowing the enemies we face, this is exactly the right move.