[mikester]

I've been fearing the same concepts. I grew up on air force bases during the cold war where I witnessed monsterous war machines on a daily basis. B-52s, B-1s, F-15s, F-16s, F-4s, etc ...

I'm not saying that was the perfect military machine by any means and I'm not saying that what we have now isn't closer to the perfect military machine.

Here's my uneducated opinion;

Our military needs to be able to fight BOTH wars; we need to train for the guerilla warfare and tactics we're facing here (We faced them in Vietnam and Somalia to name a few stand outs) and we also need to have the ability to fight a large scale conventional war.

China has not proven to be our friend and it will not take great lengths to provoke the dragon. Just this week they sent us a very strongly worded statement saying we were entirely wrong to attempt to block their bid on Unocal. Wars have been started with much less I'm sure.

We are doing some amazing training and our military has made great strides in empowering it's mobile command base and front line leaders which I think is fantastic but we've sacrified our large scale ability. We have smarter and better weapons than ever before which lends substantial quality to our forces but quantity has a quality all it's own and it is largely unmatched when combined with our other qualities.