Military to forsake the 2 front war policy?

One of the U.S.'s long standing policies has been to have a military capable of waging war on two fronts simultaneuosly. This "two front" strategy is a lasting lesson of World War II, a time in which we found that as we swung into a war footing, we could only fight decisively on one front (Pacific Theater) while merely holding out own on the second (European Theater) until we had gained superiority in the first. The military is now reviewing the two front policy.

A lot has happened in the past 50 years. In 1950, the draft was an available to ensure the military had the man power to fulfill this force. Vietnam ended up making the draft political suicide, an action that we can only bring back successfully in the case of a dire national emergency. Meanwhile, military spending has been a favorite target for spending cuts among Johnny-come-lately deficit hawks who are really nothing more than anti-military types. This has left us with a military that today may not be capable of a two front war. But that doesn't mean we should give up on that policy. What it does mean is that we should work harder to bring the military in line with what we expect of it.

This line in the article is particularly disturbing:

Senior leaders are trying to develop strategies that will do a better job of addressing the requirements of antiterrorism and domestic defense, while acknowledging that future American wars will most likely be irregular - against urban guerrillas and insurgents - rather than conventional.

It is not a given that future U.S. wars will be irregular. The number one potential future threat to the U.S. will be the Chinese military. That threat will not be "irregular". The Chinese are desparately trying to catch up to us technologically, and they will always be superior to us in manpower. That is a very regular threat that will loom large in the next 20 years. And don't think the Chinese would threaten the U.S. alone. The Chinese have been cuddling up to Russia, and that could provide a second front threat to Eastern Europe if Russia continues along its current political trajectory. Additionally, saying that Iraq is indicative of our future wars is like saying the Boer Wars would be indicative of Great Britain's future wars. It wasn't. The Boer Wars were examples of the scuffles an extremely strong nation finds itself in while everyone else starts to catch up. Iraq and the War on Terror are similar for the U.S. While we are busy securing ourselves against deadly but not overwhelming threats to our nation, other actors on the international stage are slowly but surely working to catch up, and they aren't pouring their riches into those efforts merely to reach a status quo with us. The world we face 20 years from now is going to be vastly different from the world we are looking at today. And today ain't as bad as it seems.

While we worry about Iraq stretching us too thin, it is important to realize that we've barely even lifted a finger to fight in Iraq. Outside of military families, who has really had to sacrifice in their daily lives for this war? The answer is damn few people. That means this nation has a lot more available to give in a war effort if we found ourselves in the awful position of having to fight an additional threat.

An annonymous source in the article had this little nugget of wisdom to add to the discussion:

"Whether anybody believed we could actually fight two wars at once is open to debate," one senior military officer said. "But having it in the strategy raised enough uncertainty in the minds of our opponents that it served as a deterrent. Do we want to lose that? We don't want to give any adversary the confidence that they could take advantage of us while we're engaged in one major combat operation."

The deterence capacity of the two front policy is the ace in a hole. Look, we should be looking at improving and streamlining the military whenever possible. My fear is that we have a military that is trying to put the best face on a do more with less attitude that Congress and the American public are giving it. That might not be a terrible thing for a 1995, but we are heading into a new era where we can only begin to glimpse the threats we are going to face, similar to Great Britain in 1900. Asking our military to do more with less is not in the best interests of this nation's self defense. We will see the rise of wars between set piece militaries again, and it will be in most of our lifetimes. The best deterence for that is strength and perception of strength. Tossing aside the two front policy will do exactly the opposite.