WASHINGTON, June 3 (UPI) -- The two conventional land wars that were fought in the Northern Hemisphere over the past year were both small ones, almost tiny in geographical range and short in duration.
But Russia's five-day war in Georgia in August 2008 and Israel's three-week incursion into Gaza in January 2009 taught the old, hard lesson that a country without adequate tanks, armor, combat aircraft and heavy artillery can't stand up to any country that has them.
And for all the problems that Sunni Muslim insurgents in Iraq have given the U.S. Army and Marines over the past six years, they weren't able to stop U.S.-led armed forces from conquering that country in less than three weeks in March-April 2003 and staying there ever since.
Military occupations can certainly become costly and exhausting over the months and years without an adequate political solution, but as the Red Army in 1979 and the U.S. armed forces in late 2001 both showed in Afghanistan, the only thing that can stop a well-equipped military force from conquering a country is a comparably armed military force on the other side.
Since the collapse of communism it has been widely assumed by U.S. policymakers that gigantic, full-scale land wars on major continents involving hundreds of thousands or even millions of troops have become inconceivable.
In the 21st century, U.S. policymakers, spearheaded by Donald Rumsfeld during his momentous six-year reign as secretary of defense, have been convinced that the advent of precision weapons, reconnaissance and communications means that the United States will remain militarily supreme around the world without needing hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of ground troops to fight large-scale wars.
Republicans, raised in the age of Tom Clancy novels, have lived in a world where this seemed to be true for the past quarter-century. Democrats don't buy into the vision of electronic super-weapons rendering huge masses of less well-equipped troops, cannon and armored vehicles obsolete as enthusiastically as Republicans do, but they still think that the age of massive land confrontations has passed.
That is also the wisdom in every major nation of the European Union, and it's especially the case among European Commission policymakers in Brussels.
The only trouble is that a lot of other major powers around the world do not believe it is true -- and are planning on very different assumptions.
The Russian army is currently upgrading its equipment on a more massive scale than at any time in at least the past 30 years. Until September 2008, it could afford to do that because of the soaring global price of oil and gas, and Russia was the world's largest exporter and revenue earner of those energy sources. However, even after global energy prices collapsed as the worldwide economic recession took hold last fall, the Russian government has remained resolutely committed to its ambitious military modernization plans.
And the Russian invasion of Georgia showed that the current rulers of the Kremlin certainly do not regard the use of their ground forces in conventional wars to further state aims as inconceivable.
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Part 2: Military power on the ground still matters in Africa, Asia
