Wampum

One of the works I read while I was wintering in Leavenworth and working at Army Charm School was a treatis on the 1939 engagement at Khalkhyn Gol (aka "the Nomonhan Incident"). The Imperial Staff's model of Soviet command and control was that it was rigid and predictable, rather like the model of Soviet C3I current in NATO Staffs fifty years later. The Soviet forces were lead by then-Lt. Gen. Georgi Zhukov, who committed 450 tanks and armored cars without infantry support in a counter-attack that was the first battle of its kind in June, and in August, committed 500 tanks and armored cars supported by motorized infantry and air assets and a logistical train of over a thousand trucks to a battle of maneuver and obtained the double envelopment and the complete destruction of the Japanese forces.

This particular tank was lost to the Red Army in November 1941, when it fell off of a pontoon bridge or a barge into a river near Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Its crew presumably drowned, like no small number of American armored vehicle crews that have gone into the Tigris or the Euphrates in the past four years.

But the point isn't the obviousness that for the foreseeable future, bits of American armor are going to be pulled out of rivers, canals, and ditches in Iraq. It is that the Kharkov Locomotive Plant produced almost 2,000 of the BT-5 tank, and another 6,000 of the BT-7 and 85,000 of the successor main battle tank, the T-34.

The PNAC dystopian vision is for the US to fight and win "resource wars", that is, to control the world's petroleum market.

The premise behind the "Revolution in Military Affairs" and the "smaller, lighter, more lethal" force structure, not to mention the entire intellectual wasteland of asymmetric conflict, is that the US will dominate the battle space (low orbit too) in conflicts with states that have much, much less advanced conventional arms, and at best, only rudimentary NBC capabilities, and those only "in theater".

Presumably, states with capacities equivalent to the Kharkov Locomotive Plant will just observe or write notes of protest as petroleum markets pass from nominally autonomous control to substantively US-dependent control. Because China, India, and Europe have no need of petroleum, and Russia has no strategic concerns in West Asia.

To cite Donald Rumsfeld, states articulate what force structures they have. So if the American force structure has been tuned for very high profit in the defense tech industry sector, and corresponding low volumns of highly leathal weapons systems, and minimal manpower and logistic depth, organized around C-130 air lift, not sea lift, for the purpose of quickly liquidating conventional forces which are operationally at the level of major states in the 1950s (the Iran-Iraq war was fought by armor that stopped to aim and fire the main armament, corresponding to NATO and WARSAW Pact forces prior to the 1960's, as did Iraqi armour in the 1991 and 2003 contests with modern US armour and operational art), what contests has the US force planners already decided won't happen, or the US simply won't win?

Answers on the back of a napkin please. And, as LTC Paul Yingling wrote in the May issue of Armed Forces Journal A Failure in Generalship, for the second time in a generation the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency,that is, force structures that have no critical dependency upon limited inventories of high-value targets for operational capabilities. He's looking at the asymmetric no-target problem, and I'm looking at the symmetric but in-depth problem.