For the most part, nowhere. But, it’s damn risky to assume the enemy will cooperate in a war and only fight you where you are strong. I have a hard time thinking of any major clash with China being limited to just air and sea battles. Other than a one-off incident or two, anything that would push these two behemoths into open warfare would have to be extreme enough to include some form of ground encounters I would imagine.
And China is not the only possible enemy. There are plenty of places where we could conceivably (not necessarily desirably) encounter ground forces significant enough to require more oomph than a few light infantry to overcome.
abrandt
2797
This I agree with. That’s why I said earlier that the Marines would need help from the other branches of the military. But I’m also okay with them returning more to a specialized force. If you need heavy and sustained ground presence then send in the army.
As long as the Army is a heavy and sustained ground presence. Every so often we go through this cycle of making the Army a glorified frontier constabulary because we haven’t fought a heavy enemy ground force for a while. Then of course we end up having to figure out how to face said enemy with a bunch of trucks and machine guns.
JonRowe
2799
The heritage foundation is a conservative think tank. There is a democrat in office right now, so it is imperative that the message of US Army=weak right now.
The proper term would be deficient. Or “not ready”
I would suspect if they did this in 2019, they would have used that language, or not done the “study” at all.
Excellent excellent point.
I’m surprised they didn’t throw in a “the Army’s too woke” in there, but they’re trying to appear neutral apparently to sell it better.
Or they just misspelled ‘woke’.
vyshka
2804
As a follow up to the story about former RAF pilots in China, we now have this story about a former US pilot:
It mentions the story about the British pilots, but doesn’t explicitly say what he was doing in China.
This is some military spending I can support.
I usually don’t favor spending tax dollars on a dick move, but in this case…I am firmly in favor.
Timex
2807
The tanker’s gotta be flying in one general location for a long time anyway… Might as well draw a giant dick.
I’m not allowed to say if that ever happened with nav charts on long, boring midwatches aboard a submarine.
You just had to get “firmly” in there, didn’t you?
They claim they only need 20 minutes before refueling the next plane, but it’s always more like an hour.
Matt_W
2811
Those 135s are all over 60 years old. Gonna be a lot more than an hour between refuelings.
Heh every implementation of TQM I’ve ever seen sucked goat balls.
Well, except Toyota, the sort of original example perhaps? Though I don’t know how well that aged.
Didnt Toyota also invent Just In Time? Yeah, that certainly worked out well when COVID hit and supply chains got fucked.
