The very fact that Dunkirk happened at all sortof proves my point - at the outset of WWII, the Brits had decided "won't need to do that again" about major land combat in Europe. Didn't quite work out that way.

The Brit land capabilities were always based upon the minimum required to do the job. Whenever there was a war they had to build up the army.

They relied upon the Royal Navy to keep the peace.

At the start of WWII the British had the most mobile force, using trucks and armoured personel carriers for troop transportation. They lost a lot of equipment at the fall of France.

The problem with land forces these days, as with the sea and air forces, is there is little to no lead time to build up anything.

James:

How many troops are needed for COIN work? We have Delta, Green Berets, Seals, Airborne, Marine Recon, all of which to some degree were designed to be usefull for COIN.

Ricks and others arguments sound logical until you ask what is a real war. What skills are being left in the drawer when a brigade goes into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan?

How many times have we trained for the previous war only to be faced with a completely different scenario. How do you train for what you do not know? Basic fighting skills are used in any situation.

I’m genuinely curious: What suggestions, if any, do you have for addressing this problem?

I'm coming to the reluctant conclusion, which I've rejected for years, that we'll probably have to segregate the Army into specialty units that primarily train for COIN and stability operations and others who primary do combat. I'm not sure if even that'll work, though, for large-scale COIN ops like Iraq, which suck up so large a percentage of the force.

This may be one of those situations that Don Rumsfeld used to talk about: "If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact, not to be solved, but to be coped with over time."

These things take many years to build, and the need for them can emerge quite quickly. In 1929, after all, Germany seemed no threat.

I'm genuinely curious: What suggestions, if any, do you have for addressing this problem?

Personally, I would rather our soldiers brush up on this style of fighting and know how to fight it, since it is currently the war we are in.

War and how it is fought isn't a historical constant.

First, I'm not convinced there is what we are pleased to call a 'conventional war' on our horizon. There's nobody at this stage with the military strength wage such a war against us, who actually would do so. Those with enough strength to do so, would undoubtedly use Nuclear weapons, instead. Those without the strength to do so would use the kind of insurgency we're seeing now.

Seondly, I submit that part of the reason those traditional skills have atrophied is because so much of our training, anymore centers not on fighting skills but on keeping the military trained as a 'meals on wheels', and on being subordinate to the so called "United Nations".