Desert Shield and Storm

 In a letter to the American Legion Magazine, March 2021, John Walsh wrote that Shield and Storm did not show capabilities for future warfare.  Instead, they were, he opined, postscripts to conventional war.  Enemies are not likely to engage the USA force-on-force because we have too many big weapons. 

I suspect Mr. Walsh is correct.  Warfare has moved beyond the big-army phase.  Instead, insurgencies, irregular warfare, and hit-and-run operations are tactical problem. We could win a war by destroying a country from afar but that is not acceptable. Instead, combined arms operations using highly mobile forces are necessary.  

Wargamers will be modeling scenarios in which the objective is to engage the enemy directly in smaller operations where both sides are highly mobile and both sides may have man-carried missiles as well as other technological advances.  Scenarios might be borrowed from the American western expansion instead of the European colonial era.  The battle of Little Big Horn is not a good example but I am sure others can be found.