I guess we just fundamentally disagree.
ODS was a fairly unique, limited, and very abrupt conflict and can’t be used to predict future warfare.
Over-predicting future warfare to narrowly tailor current training is as bad as training for the last war. Infantry have been critical in every single war in the 20th and 21st centuries… except for ODS, which was unique.
Our air power, armor, fires, and EW are really quite impressive. But they can’t actually seize and hold key terrain or objectives. And quite frankly, we don’t have enough munitions to spend on all the soft targets that aren’t high value or high payoff. Nor do we have enough airframes and maintainers to keep aviation overhead everywhere. And the bleeding edge of autonomy research and UASes/robotics could theoretically supplant infantry in the future… but that time isn’t now or even the near future.
When you annihilate any logistics hubs and turn any transportation assets into smoldering remains before Infantry have a chance to even deploy into the theater, our Infantry don’t have to take any ground from them because threat forces never even reached their intended dismount points. This is happening before any Infantry unit even gets alerted. It’s all over too fast.
With the way we do layered ISR now, there isn’t any way to get through those chokepoints and allow threat Infantry to fulfill their mid-stage transportation plans. They wouldn’t even survive early-staging and departure of friendly lines in most cases.
If we were to prosecute ODS today, it would look much different, go down much faster, with more brutal efficiency and speed. For ODS, not all of our TACAIR strike platforms were night/all weather capable, with precision-guided munitions.
Most of the F-16 force at the time lacked any of those capabilities. Now ALL of the combat-coded F-16CJs have it, plus Wild Weasel capes, and they are outdated compared to F-35A.
The layers of satellites, high-altitude/high endurance drones, manned ISR, mid-altitude ISR, and low altitude ISR platforms are a totally different force structure than in 1990-1991, and many of those are armed with PGMs.
I did a series of analyses overlaying modern combat capabilities over several key conflicts in the 20th Century to see how they would go down, then looked at each Theater Combatant Command and extrapolated campaign evolution against modern threats in each of those regions. This is why I don’t see a place on the timeline for Infantry to even be deployed in a combat capacity for these types of Larger-Scale Conflicts.
I DO see a more modernized Infantry as maybe one of the key assets in COIN and contingencies where lower-intensity conflict emerges as matters of surrogates for the larger actors. SOF would be the lead leveraging host nations in that though, supported by US and coalition/regional air.
But the internal propaganda of Infantry taking ground, seizing key terrain, and repelling a conventional army’s counter-attack are outdated and repeated to a minority internal audience to make us believe we were some kind of bleeding edge element to the success of any overall future campaign.
If someone can talk me through the specific region where they see Infantry playing the advertised key role that were were told in 11 series land, I’m all ears. I’ve looked at Europe, ME, Asia, Central America, South America, Africa, and the islands of the South Pacific, including near Australia and Indonesia. None of these regions make any sense to deploy Infantry in a historical sense.
