Remember how the US went into Afghanistan with HMMWVs (aluminum bodied cars with canvas doors) and M16a2s (full length battle rifles with iron sights) and left with MRAPs and A4s. You learn stuff when you switch from training to combat.
"Instead, the new incentive for most countries would be to build a military in a way that aims to minimize the political costs... it makes sense not to build an army for conventional operations but instead with an eye towards the kinds of actions which mitigate the harm caused by failed states: armies aimed at policing actions or humanitarian operations."
MRAPs exist to minimize the political costs (dead and wounded soldiers) in a policing action. When you look at conventional wars like Ukraine, HMMWVs remain very relevant in their doctrinal role.
The combat part was ok I guess, but what OP is pointing out was what we went to conflict with. Lots of money was spent upgrading Humvees with armor and turret mounts that didn't exist. The equipment fielded by US troops actually looked very different from a comparison of 2001 and 2005. Body armor went through development iterations, camouflage patterns, infantry equipment like magazine carriers and weapons optics, and so on.
Had the US tried to drive into the Afghan and Iraqi desert the way we did against fighters armed with heavier weapons and fighting skills then the US losses would have been a lot higher.
The Iraqi military had more formidable equipment but was so ill-trained and the moral so low that it was very much a paper tiger.
I think people underestimate hiw much the US military has transformed over the two two-decade long conflicts. There have been striking changes both organizationally, culturally, and technologically.
I’m not a military and/or Iraq war expert so I don’t want to argue definitively, but I don’t think you can say US losses would have been significantly higher had the Iraqi army had heavier weapons and fighting skills — they’d have needed effective air defense, too.
I think the Ru-UKR war shows the vulnerability of contemporary air forces to air defense, however, and that Western/NATO forces themselves lack cost-effective short-range and medium-range air defense systems. The US Air Force fields exquisite weapons (“platforms”) and these may prove useless in a conflict like Ru-UKR. Or, perhaps, they’re good enough to overcome the difficulties that the Sukhoi/MiG-based air forces of either side have encountered. Hard to know.
Range and mobility in artillery systems also seems like a weak point for the US military. The Excalibur precision shell is very expensive but likely cost effective—one shot, one kill. But the US M777 towed howitzer costs ~$3.7M (titanium) while the French Caesar costs $5-6M and can outrange the M777 in addition to driving away immediately after firing.
Afghanistan may have been a different story.
The US has the M109 which can serve in some of the same roles the Caesar can.
Also, does France have much rocket artillery? That might play a factor in the requirements for other artillery systems.
Mind you much of it was political: "we're about to occupy a country where 20 million people want to kill us" would have sounded pretty awful at the State of the Union.
As one example, at the start of the war in Afghanistan, Marine scout snipers would operate in two-man teams. This was a Vietnam-era SOP that favored stealth over firepower--two men can't lay down much heat, but they don't need to if the enemy can't find and engage them. It's pretty easy to hide a couple guys in a jungle, so it worked well.
The problem with that doctrine in Afghanistan is that hiding even two men is difficult in arid environments. A team is far more likely to be seen regardless of its size and needs to be able to defend itself if compromised, which happens far more often in a desert. By 2010 the SOP was 8-man teams. At least one bloody incident was the cause of those numbers being bumped up.
There's a saying that rings true, "The military is always fighting the last war".
It's a saying that people in the military are well aware of (OEF Veteran here). We were well aware of what happened in Vietnam with counterinsurgency. The problem is that counterinsurgency just doesn't work unless you treat the country like an imperial colony. We didn't do that, in Iraq or in Afghanistan. It wasn't worth the resources to "do Imperialism" in those places, and so we got a half-assed "strategy" that wasn't really related to any seriously considered national objective.
>The problem with that doctrine in Afghanistan is that hiding even two men is difficult in arid environments.
The Taliban were able to do this with ease.
Same. That's where I heard it.
> The Taliban were able to do this with ease.
The Taliban weren't doing what we were doing. They generally did not, to my knowledge, go out and sit in an OP on a rocky hillside for 3-5 days straight, where any random goat herder might happen to decide to graze his herd one afternoon. Their MO was to set up an ambush that would be executed the same day and that was not likely to be discovered by a passing American, since Americans weren't wandering randomly through the hills at all times.
Changing organizational processes tends to be extremely hard in large orgs, and I wonder how the military deals with it.
It's worth noting that this was one of many incremental changes. When I started that deployment in 2009, snipers were going out in 5-man teams. The team that got hit actually did technically consist of 8 men (as was already the SOP), but they were split into two four-man elements that took different positions about a kilometer apart. The mandate going forward was that all 8 team members had to be within earshot of each other at all times. It was the latest of many orders in the trend of ratcheting up firepower at the cost of concealability.
The incident you're talking about happened much earlier, in Iraq. I believe this article is referencing it: https://www.dvidshub.net/news/6921/former-magnificent-bastar...
It doesn't say they fell asleep, because of course there's no way to know that. It's an assumption that has been repeated as fact, though it does seem likely.
Barrel length is important to velocity up to a point, but you can also tune other parts of the system to increase velocity out of shorter barrels (M855A1). However, that is far from the only consideration when discussing the ballistics of a cartridge. Projectile mass determines how stable the projectile is. The 5.56 projectile tumbles and cavitates when hitting soft tissue due to its low mass. However, that also means obstructions like foliage can cause it to destabilize in-flight and it is less effective at barrier penetration.
Well they did have unbeatable prices on this red taint from a producer in… Germany. Yup. Some people are actually good at war.
It’s about misunderstanding new technology notably machine guns or to be even more correct a military career structure and organisation which prevented people who understood new technologies and try to shake the boat to rise in ranks while putting conservative officers in control of the army.
It isn't as if there was no war for a generation. The Russo-Japanese war in 1904-5 was precisely the kind of brutal industrial conflict that foreshadowed the horrors of WWI almost to a T.
But Western powers were mostly unwilling to learn from such a distant war, and lessons learnt by junior officers who observed the carnage closely weren't taken seriously enough.
In this specific case humvees were particularly ineffective against the IED-based warfare being conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan. Light, fast, vehicles are not particularly resilient to explosives.
Also, while the 20” battle rifle does provide superior ballistics for the 5.56 round, it’s unwieldy and there was a fair bit of CQB during the GWOT. 14.5” carbines were a sort of middle ground that could perform in both long range and short range engagements. Night time direct action raids by special forces even opt for shorter 10.5/11.5 barrels.
I recommend Jeff Gurwitch on YouTube he goes in depth into the history and rational behind equipment evolutions during the GWOT from a first hand perspective as an ex-SF soldier.
M4: a short barrel is easier to use in close quarters fighting, and this outweighs the loss of accuracy at longer distances.