Analysis: US revamps military

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3291515.stm

Analysis: US revamps military

By Nick Childs
BBC Pentagon correspondent

The Pentagon is considering a realignment of US forces - with far-reaching implications. <snip>

It is not, Mr Feith insisted this week, a short-term effort to free up troops for Iraq. <snip>

Many of the forces are still configured chiefly to fight "in place", whereas what the Pentagon is now looking for is forces that can deploy rapidly, to "project power" in the jargon, to wherever a crisis might develop.The review clearly took on greater urgency after the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the conflict with Iraq.
It could mean fewer forces stationed in certain countries, a greater reliance on simply having prepositioned equipment in place and more emphasis on rotating troops into and out of certain regions for short periods. <snip>

The Bush administration is clearly anxious to avoid suspicions that, with this review, it is really in the business of retrenchment, isolationism and unilateralism. <snip>

If they are getting a clue about the declining cost-effectiveness
and political utility of large, old-style conventional armies and
such, and are drawing the proper conclusions, that would be a good
thing. So far what I see looks more like a fantasy that lots of
high-tech electronics other fancy expensive equipment will somehow
make up for it, and keep the old military game alive, and that is
not a good thing.

I tend to believe that it must be!

in the direction opposite from where they are pointing ...

The African School for Security Cooperation
The Islamic School for Security Cooperation
The Central Asian School for Security Cooperation
The Far East School for Security Cooperation
The The Southwestern Pacific School for Security Cooperation
and the New Europe School for Security Cooperation.

We can zoom around and break things like no other country in the world but we can't control them. We need some way to get puppet dictators established with cadres of trained knee-cappers to keep those client, er, I mean liberated states in line.

"We can zoom around and break things like no other
country in the world but we can't control them"

That is what I mean by "declining utility". You used to
be able to conquer something and expect it to stay conquered
for a while, long enough to steal enough to pay for the effort.
That doesn't seem to work anymore.

I think they are going to have tougher sledding with the
knee-cappers too, the rubes are wise to the method these days.
Iraq is a textbook case.