It's interesting to see the U.S. military retooling for these low-level occupation and anti-insurgency operations. Systems like the Zumwalt destroyers, littoral combat ships, America-class amphibious assault ships, Predator/Reaper/Avenger drones, and laser weapon systems are all adapted to low-intensity, close-to-shore work.
I also wonder whether the assumption that the next big war will a great-power conflict with China, Russia, etc. will actually hold. Our template for what war looks like is WW2, because that's the last time in living memory that the whole world erupted in high intensity warfare. So we've naturally built a military machine to fight the last war, but with bigger and more high-tech weaponry.
But historically, Peter Thiel's observation that "each moment in history happens only once" may be closer to the truth. The era of nation-states duking it out with industrialized armored weaponry started with the Russo-Japanese war in 1905 and ended with WW2 in 1945; it had never happened before, and it never happened afterwards. The previous template for wars before then were the "wars of nationalism" (U.S. civil war, unification of Germany, unification of Italy) in the 1860s-1870s - these had some use of industrialization, but still featured things like cavalry charges and generals personally leading troops into battle. Before then was Napoleon's conquest in 1812, and before that were the American and French revolutions, both of which were very different types of war with entirely different political groups on each side.
For all we know, the next major war might look like Syria but on a global scale, with numerous non-national actors all fighting over territory, resources, and mindshare.