I feel like people have a tendency to overlearn some lessons from previous wars due to a lack of dialectical analysis, basically the failure to consider alternative arguments. Through observation through US and Russia's past wars, specifically Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and Chechenia, a lot of people have arrived at wrong conclusions by assuming all wars to be more similar than they are.
Lesson 1:
Winning conventional wars is easy, winning counter-insurgencies is hard.
First, I believe the US experience in the middle east are can't be replicated. Russia have to rush their wars due to political reasons, whereas the propaganda advantage of the Anglo Cartel allow them to portray any wars they wage as righteous, allowing them to prepare as much as they want without interruptions.
Let's take Desert Storm for example, I don't believe most people realized how outmatched Iraq really is. Numerically, American troops alone outnumber the entire Iraqi forces. Iraq have no external supporters, with France straight up compromising the Iraqi air defenses when the Americans asked (their Soviet AD systems are managed by French networks and trained by the British. Don't buy from Europe, seriously, just don't, they are not your friends and will sell out to the Americans every time). The coalition conducted 42 days of uninterrupted air campaign before beginning the ground offensive, while Iraq merely watched as the coalition build up in Saudi Arabia.
This an interesting write up on Iraqi airdefense during desert storm.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/rkjc6h
Months of Uninterrupted air campaign is absolutely not a luxury that can afforded to anyone but the United States,
Secondly, I think it's a huge surprise to everyone how well Ukraine is able to hold out conventionally, this is an obvious sign that conventional ground push is a lot harder than most people assume, on the other hand, when given a choice of fighting conventionally or as irregular guerrilla, most would prefer fighting as a part of conventional forces. This obviously bolsters the strength of conventional forces but also reduces the manpower available to insurgencies, there is no point to preparing to fight insurgencies without overcoming the hurdle of conventional forces first. In a way, stiff conventional resistance is mutually exclusive to a thriving Guerilla campaign.
Lesson 2:
Downsizing is the way to go
In the past few decade, we have seen the downsizing of pretty much every major militaries in the world, the Battalion Tactical Group, Combined Arms Brigade and Brigade Combat Team have become the new basic independent unit formations. It is conventional wisdom that the downsizing of division into brigades(Russia seem to went even further with the downsizing than US and China) allow for greater rapid response capabilities, increase professionalization while freeing up the budget to increase the quality of equipment and personnel. It is generally assumed that amplified firepower could make up for the low frontline personnel strength, however, as we can see in Ukraine, increasingly lethal modern weaponry have resulted in unprecedented casualty figures within a short timeframe while major casualties could render smaller formations unable to function independently. BTGs in Ukraine suffered from chronic low infantry strength and were subjected to frequent reorganization and consolidation into ad hoc formations.
Lesson 3: Squad level fire support is purely a good thing.
Many observers are no doubts impressed by the responsiveness of US fire support, by how US infantry squad have a direct line of communication and the authority to call in airstrikes or artillery at a minute's notice. While pushing heavy firepower down to the squad level have its obvious advantages, it is not realistic unless you drastically outclasses your opponent conventionally. We can observe crippling level of ammo usages in the war in Ukraine, where two conventional armies of similar size duked it out, this isn't the whack a mole war that the United States is fighting for the past 60 years. Pushing fire support down to every squad may be inadvisable due to a lack of ammunition, overloading of command and communication and poor resource prioritization.
TLDR: Counter-insurgency tends to suffer from an overabundance of firepower and lack of targets, conventional war tends to suffer from an overabundance of targets and lack of firepower, assess and plan accordingly.
