The British understood this when the Argintines started shooting Exocets during the Falklands war. But the British prevailed anyway and could never have retaken the Falklands by waging a counterinsurgency. The US has not fought an opponent with militarily technology that rivaled it's own for a very long time maybe not since WWII. So while China builds planes and ships and tanks should we plan on defending Taiwan and theh pacific sea lanes with asymetric warefare or with steel?

"The Air Force seeks to use technology to validate a questionable concept: strategic bombardment. Now, weâ??re almost a hundred years into the era of strategic bombing. In that time, you can count on the fingers of one hand how many such campaigns ever succeeded. Yet the Air Force continues to try to make this work. Shock and Awe â?? which did nothing besides spurring some Iraqis to join the insurgencyâ?? is the linear descendant of strategic, round-the-clock carpet bombing in World War II, of Curtis LeMayâ??s ideas and of Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam. Strategically, itâ??s a trail of tears. Yet the Air Force is still on it."

I disagree whole hartedly. What we saw in Iraq was not shock and awe. The fear of world opinion prevented that. However bombing Serbia ended the Kosovo confligration quite effectively without a boot on the ground. Few bombing campaing may have succeeded but how many have been tried? Just a few. Even in Vietnam aftwerwards we found out that strategic bombing was much more effective than we knew at the time. In the latest Iraq war the US rolled in to Baghdad fighting against punks in pickup trucks because there were no tanks left after the air campaing which only started around the time of the invasion. How can any one argue against the value of bombing? I think there needs to be more facts discussed to make the point that bombing is a "trail of tears". I don't see it except as tears for the enemy.

"It bothers the hell out of me that Future Warrior is focused simply on throwing enough technology at the individual soldier to make him invincible, like the armored knight of the middle ages. I think itâ??s like the related Future Combat System for Army vehicles â?? largely a wrong-headed approach. The Future Combat System has so far not been thought of as a real system of interconnecting parts. With these programs, weâ??re really de-emphasizing the connectivity part of military effectiveness. Thatâ??s unfortunate. The more your people are interconnected and work skillfully with each other, the more effective they are."

I think this is just plain wrong. The "future warrior technology" where it is introduced in Iraq is given highly favorable reviews by the troops exactly because it helps them work skillfully with eachother. Troops know where other troops are and communication between air and ground forces are improved.

"The real answer is about understanding the enemy as a system and trying to pull that system apart. But weâ??re not doing that. Weâ??re going simply for the technological fix and thatâ??s one reason weâ??ve had so much trouble with these IEDs. "

There is a technological fix and it has worked. The military has used software developed for police work to analyze intelligence about the insurgents and it works.

"Since weâ??re spending so much on military affairs, maybe some of that should be directed towards technologies that will break our opponentsâ?? communications."

Huh? Electronic intelligence is one of our strongest areas.

I just wish there was a little more money spent on the men and women and less on gadgets overall.

Another vessel however was just the opposite. It had very little in the way of weapons or armament but had multiple-array radar systems that gave the Admiral of the fleet a full picture of the entire area covering both the arabian penninsula and most of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. From his perch, the Admiral could see the disposition of all of our forces, including air and land forces in real time.

When the fighting broke out, it was from this vessel, from that one room with radar and computer images projected on large screen monitors covering three walls, that the war was directed. The reality of this vessel far exceeded anything that I have ever seen in any movie and that was more than 15 years ago.

Without this technology I have no doubt that Desert Storm would have lasted much longer than it did, and it would have cost much more in casualties. I have no problem going hi-tech.