If the Pentagon had been "graded on how it performed during the first weeks of Operation Desert Storm, it would have received something better than an A-plus. "Overachievement" and "overkill" are other terms that come to mind in describing the success of the war.
While the air battles pounded Iraq, and aircraft losses and casualties were amazingly low, the conflict did reveal major gaps in the ability of the United States to deal with the sort of regional conflicts that are likely to dominate the decade of the 1990's.
From a pure logistics standpoint, it took too long (over five months) to get enough war material into the Persian Gulf theater of operations. Some of the most sophisticated and expensive weapons in the U.S. arsenal (such as the B-1 bomber and the Trident submarine) were absent and apparently were not even missed (Dwyer, 1991, p. 30).
The workhorses of this war were machines and equipment based upon the technology of the 1960's. One of the clearest messages that the military/industrial complex in the United States has been sent is that the Soviet menace is no longer real.
Now that the Warsaw Pact has dissolved, military planners must pay more attention to regional fire-fights against well-equipped, although not necessarily well-trained Third World armies. Clearly the battles of the future will be low-intensity conflicts fought with high-tech weapons (Dwyer, 1991, p. 30) in an environment where only one superpower exists to mitigate the conflict and assure the "fairness of the fight" on both sides of the battlefield.
Defense Secretary Dick Cheney has conceded that the bulky U.S. military needs to become a smaller and more mobile force. This scaled-down Army of the future will require better, smaller, and more maintenance-equipment. It will also require a higher level of training to assure proper application and performance of the man-to-equipment interface in the field.
By 1995, active duty pe...