The Weaker Foe – Part 2: Transforming the Army to Win as the Near-Peer Competitor

"During the Cold War this Army proved transformational as it learned from the defeat in Vietnam; adapted to an evolving, complex, and existential threat in the Soviet Union; and became the Army that won decisively on the ground in Desert Storm. That Army was innovative doctrinally, recognized that risks must be taken to defeat a numerically superior foe, and developed the physical and mental agility demonstrated in the VII Corps transitioning from 40 years of preparing to defend the hills, forests, and towns of Germany to deploying the entire Corps thousands of miles and flowing into a successful attack in the desert of Iraq. Since then, those qualities have gradually eroded. As covered in Part 1 of this article series, those qualities have been replaced by an Army that is risk-averse to the point of paralysis, centrally controlled and micromanaged (not for the first time, as the defeat in Vietnam demonstrates), and not only lacking in cunning and innovation, but no longer even engaged in developing those qualities. As countless engagements and operations post-9/11 have illustrated, the U.S. Army has become a ponderous, slow-moving (and slow thinking), rigid force, continually challenged by smaller, less well-equipped, agile, adaptive, and innovative foes. The clearest example of this disparity was in the IED campaigns of multiple foes in Iraq and Afghanistan, where large, slow moving U.S. convoys moving along predictable routes never gained the initiative against small, agile IED cells that were able to adapt techniques and technologies faster than U.S. forces."