Gates' Military Transformation

CATO's Benjamin Friedman makes a good observation:

The current American love affair with counterinsurgency has resulted in a gradual shift of dollars from the conventional budget to the unconventional one. We are reversing the old idea that the American way of war is to replace labor with capital, or manpower with technology. We are becoming a land power first.

All of this mostly because of the supposed lessons of the Iraq war. What's ironic is that, had the Bush administration listened to Obama's advice in 2003 and not invaded Iraq, there's a good bet we wouldn't even be having this debate over counter-insurgency. I still don't understand why someone who ostensibly opposed the Iraq war would want his defense secretary to configure a military to fight future wars of this kind.

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Photo via jamesdeal10 under a CC License.