Building an Army That Can Build Nations

In today’s WPR top story, Richard Weitz points out that while the military’s doctrinal embrace of stability and reconstruction operations in counterinsurgency warfare is a welcome development, there’s no certainty that it will survive the Pentagon-Capitol Hill funding corridor. As Weitz points out, the Army that does the fighting is not the same Army that does the shopping, and Congress, for all its rhetoric about transformation, still has a penchant for funding the big ticket items that have little application to post-conflict reconstruction operations. There’s also the little problem of branch rivalry: speak the words “stability operations” to the Navy […]