Photo: Blunt instrument. The U.S. military was built to fight and win wars, not rebuild entire nations from scratch. Yuri CORTEZ/AFP/Getty Images"The U.S. Military Is Still Too Focused On Conventional Warfare." -- Foreign Policy Blog
Why the U.S. Army's focus on nation-building at the expense of warfighting is misguided and dangerous.
Absolutely not. In fact, over the past six-plus years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army has become a counterinsurgency-only force. The notion that there are still some conventional-minded bogeymen lurking in the shadows and waiting for the chance to take the Army back to the 1980s so that it can prepare to fight the Soviets in the Fulda Gap is a chimera.
There are understandable reasons why the Army has become so focused on counterinsurgency: The operational demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan demand it. Counterinsurgency expert John Nagl is thus correct when he calls for "winning" the wars we are in now. Currently, when Army combat brigades go to any of the national training centers for preparation for deployment to Afghanistan or Iraq, they primarily train on counterinsurgency operations.
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