An infantry battalion can be deployed more easily to fight the Taliban or al Qaeda than a Special Forces Battalion can be deployed to fight the North Koreans or the Chinese divisions. (We have way too few of them trained and ready to do so, however.) Counterinsurgency operations can be specialized; but the grunt work of clearing and securing an area, be it the Anbar or the Kunar Valley, can be done very effectively by conventional forces.
Only a fraction of the active duty forces should be specialized in guerilla/COIN operations. (I believe that 10% is plenty.) The rest of the Army and Marine Corps must be ready to fight a campaign on the ground against a determined, skilled and well-equipped adversary.
There are a lot of neat badges these days for soldiers to wear. Just about everybody gets one. It does no harm to have such a badge for a counter-insurgency specialist; but it won't make a difference to the Battalion Staffs, when the time comes.
I agree with the Col. As a senior NCO I have deployed twice so far to Iraq with the National Guard. I have been a part of a painful transformation that is still going on in the Texas Guard. I am a Cold War vet and am conserned that a lot if these changes are a kin to a knee jerk reaction to the attacks on 9-11. Yes we should adapt to the new global situations and threats but such a broad stoke like converting most of your combat arms units to non-combat ones is in my opinion going a little too far. Then after tankers,scouts,and infantry men are transformed into plumbers, carpenters, electritions, clerks, and human resource managers and send them to combat to run convoys and provide local security it's a bit redundant. On my last deployment most of my time was spent writting and proofing 638's and all kinds of other paper work. This is a far cry from a platoon sergeant in a tank platoon. The young troops coming up in the ranks today are being deprived of the essential training that make a combat Soilder elite.
W/r/t what has been labeled as the GWOT, I think that overall strategy (elevating terrorism to the status of a war) is a mistake that glorifies the terrorists and attracts others (however misguided) to the "cause". One man's terrorist is another man's "freedom fighter".
The real effort in that area should be an internationally (as much as possible) cooperative law enforcement, with priority military support wherever required. Terrorists are criminals pure and simple, and should be handled and treated as such - that removes the glorification of the "cause".
With counterinsurgency there should be ongoing training where officers and NCOs get sent periodically (yearly) to build/hone/retain skills. But the armed forces need to be ready to handle conventional wars between nations - hence training for both needs to be ongoing, and warfighting skills have to be retained for large and small scale conflicts. And clearly, foreign language training should be encouraged, especially with the boots on the ground.
That said, our future leadership needs to be a lot more careful about when/where to commit the US military to action.
The truth is that the military needs to keep all the tools in the toolbox. We cannot allow either conventional or unconventional warfare skills to rust.
One way or another, we are going to transition out of Iraq and Afghanistan over the next decade, at least as combatants. At that point, we should always have at least one infantry brigade focused on unconventional warfare.
My thinking is that conventional skills are necessary to defeat immediate existential threats. And, we can retrain conventional units over time to combat unconventional threats. However, unconventional units may need much more training to adequately combat immediate conventional threats, or else we can wind up with another Task force Smith; The result of switching occupation troops to heavy combat with no train up period.
