On August 5 and 6, a whole mess of senior Pentagon leadership and military brass will convene in California's Mojave Desert to witness something both spectacular and confusing. In the middle of the night, under a bright desert moon, US soldiers bristling with high-tech weaponry and other assorted killamajigs will gently parachute from the sky, then capture and secure an objective. Sort of.
It will be the grand finale of Operation Dragon Spear, an exercise from which the bigwigs are supposed to draw useful conclusions about how the US military will fight in years to come. The army, like the rest of the military, is still working through the implications of President Barack Obama's shift from the
. Bush-era focus on fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. This involves planning for threats other than insurgents and suicide bombers, which means thinking about the kind of big, proper armies capable of fielding lots of heavy weapons like tanks, ground attack aircraft, artillery, and helicopters. That, in turn, will drive changes in US equipment and training.
Operation Dragon Spear is a signal that the US Army is turning its attention from low-intensity counterinsurgency conflicts, which it's been engaged in for close to 15 years, to conventional wars — variously described by the Pentagon as high-intensity conflict, full-spectrum operations, major contingency operations, and decisive action. Whatever term is used, the Pentagon is referring to the kind of insanely destructive conflict that would result if the US found itself in a war with Russia, China, or what is called a "peer or near-peer competitor," which means anyone with a large, high-tech military.
